“It’s a stick more than a column already,” said he confidentially, offering the long paper, and then gravely looking at Buchanan, with head bent forward, not through his spectacles but over them.

The editor negligently accepted the proof, and I read a series of titles:  “Knype v.  Manchester Rovers.  Record Gate.  Fifteen thousand spectators.  Two goals in twelve minutes.  Myatt in form.  Special Report.”

Buchanan gave the slip back without a word.

“There you are!” said he to me, as another compositor near us attached a piece of tissue paper to his machine.  It was the very paper that I had seen come out of the sky, but its contents had been enlarged and amended by the sub-editorial pen.  The man began tapping, tapping, and the letters began to flash downwards on their way to tell a quarter of a million people that Axe v.  Macclesfield had been stopped by fog.

“I suppose that Knype match is over by now?” I said.

“Oh no!” said Buchanan.  “The second half has scarcely begun.”

“Like to go?” Stirling asked.

“Well,” I said, feeling adventurous, “it’s a notion, isn’t it?”

“You can run Mr Loring down there in five or six minutes,” said Buchanan.  “And he’s probably never seen anything like it before.  You might call here as you come home and see the paper on the machines.”

III

We went on the Grand Stand, which was packed with men whose eyes were fixed, with an unconscious but intense effort, on a common object.  Among the men were a few women in furs and wraps, equally absorbed.  Nobody took any notice of us as we insinuated our way up a rickety flight of wooden stairs, but when by misadventure we grazed a human being the elbow of that being shoved itself automatically and fiercely outwards, to repel.  I had an impression of hats, caps, and woolly overcoats stretched in long parallel lines, and of grimy raw planks everywhere presenting possibly dangerous splinters, save where use had worn them into smooth shininess.  Then gradually I became aware of the vast field, which was more brown than green.  Around the field was a wide border of infinitesimal hats and pale faces, rising in tiers, and beyond this border fences, hoardings, chimneys, furnaces, gasometers, telegraph-poles, houses, and dead trees.  And here and there, perched in strange perilous places, even high up towards the sombre sky, were more human beings clinging.  On the field itself, at one end of it, were a scattered handful of doll-like figures, motionless; some had white bodies, others red; and three were in black; all were so small and so far off that they seemed to be mere unimportant casual incidents in whatever recondite affair it was that was proceeding.  Then a whistle shrieked, and all these figures began simultaneously to move, and then I saw a ball in the air.  An obscure, uneasy murmuring rose from the immense multitude like