He held me up at the barrier (yes, he held me up in the first moment of our acquaintance) while he fumbled for his pass.  He had given the word “Press” with an exaggerated aplomb that showed he was young to his job, and the gate-keeper challenged him.  It was, in fact, the exquisite self-consciousness of the little man that made me look at him.  And he caught me looking at him; he blushed, caught himself blushing and smiled to himself with the most delicious appreciation of his own absurdity.  And as he stood there fumbling, and holding me up while he argued with the gate-keeper, who didn’t know him, I got his engaging twinkle.  It was as if he looked at me and said, “See me swank just then?  Funny, wasn’t it?”

He hung about on the edge of the crowd for a while with his hands in his pockets, sucking his little blond moustache and looking dreamy and rather incompetent.  I was a full-blown journalist even then, and I remember feeling a sort of pity for his youth.  He was so obviously on his maiden trip, and obviously, I fancied, doomed never to arrive in any port.

Well—­well; I came upon him afterwards at a crisis in the game.  He was taking notes in shorthand with a sort of savagery between his tense and concentrated glares at the scrimmage that was then massed in the centre of the field.  Woolwich Arsenal and East Kent, locked in each other’s bodies, now struggled and writhed and butted like two immense beasts welded together by the impact of their battle, now swayed and quivered and snorted as one beast torn by a solitary and mysterious rage.

Self-consciousness had vanished from my man.  He stood, leaning forward with his legs a little apart.  His boyish face was deeply flushed; he had sucked and bitten his blond moustache into a wisp; he was breathing heavily, with his mouth ajar; his very large and conspicuous blue eyes glittered with a sort of passion. (He wore those eyes in his odd little ugly face like some inappropriate decoration.)

All these symptoms declared that he was “on.”  They made up a look that I was soon to know him by.

I remember marvelling at his excitement.

I remember also discussing the match with him as we went back to town.  It must have been then that he began to tell me about himself:  that his name was James Tasker Jevons; that he lived, or hoped to live, by going about the country and reporting the big cricket and football matches.

At least he called it reporting.  I shouldn’t think there has ever been any reporting like it before or since.

I told him I was out for my paper, the Morning Standard, too.  Not exactly reporting, in his sense (I little knew what his sense was when I put it that way); and there left it.  You see, I didn’t want to rub it into the poor chap that the stranger he had been unfolding himself to so quaintly was a cut above his job.