Seeley fished his watch from under a pillow.  It was after ten o’clock and the game would begin at two.  While he hurried into his clothes he was conscious of a distinct thrill of excited interest akin to his old-time joy in the day’s work.  Could he “do this kind of stuff in fine style”?  Why, before his brain had begun to be always tired, when he was the star reporter of the Chronicle, his football introductions had been classics in Park Row.  If there was a spark of the old fire left in him he would try to strike it out, and for the moment he forgot the burden of inertia which had so long crushed him.

“But I don’t want to run into Dick Giddings and his crowd,” he muttered as he sought his hat and overcoat.  “And I’ll be up in the press-box away from the mob of old grads.  Perhaps my luck has turned.”

When Henry Seeley reached the Yale field the eleven had gone to the dressing-rooms in the training house, and he hovered on the edge of the flooding crowds, fairly yearning for a glimpse of the Freshman full-back and a farewell grasp of his hand.  The habitual dread lest the son find cause to be ashamed of his father had been shoved into the background by a stronger, more natural emotion.  But he well knew that he ought not to invade the training quarters in these last crucial moments.  Ernest must not be distraught by a feather’s weight of any other interest than the task in hand.  The coaches would be delivering their final words of instruction and the old Yale guard could picture to himself the tense absorption of the scene.  Like one coming out of a dream, the past was returning to him in vivid, heart-stirring glimpses.  Reluctantly he sought his place in the press-box high above the vast amphitheatre.

The preliminary spectacle was movingly familiar:  the rippling banks of color which rose on all sides to frame the long carpet of chalked turf; the clamorous outbursts of cheering when an eddy of Yale or Princeton undergraduates swirled and tossed at command of the dancing dervish of a leader at the edge of the field below; the bright, buoyant aspect of the multitude as viewed en masse.  Seeley leaned against the railing of his lofty perch and gazed at this pageant until a sporting editor, long in harness, nudged his elbow and said: 

“Hello!  I haven’t seen you at a game in a dozen years.  Doing the story or just working the press-badge graft?  That namesake of yours will be meat for the Tigers, I’m afraid.  Glad he doesn’t belong to you, aren’t you?”

Seeley stared at him like a man in a trance and replied evasively: 

“He may be good enough.  It all depends on his sand and nerve.  Yes, I am doing the story for a change.  Have you the final line-up?”

“Princeton is playing all her regular men,” said the sporting editor, giving Seeley his note-book.  “The only Yale change is at full-back—­and that’s a catastrophe.”