out seven in the morning, when I met
a man in a flannel shirt with no collar attached to it, a three days'
beard, a suit of homespun, and heavy ankle jack-boots much bemired with
the clay of the rain-sodden fields. He smoked a short clay pipe and
looked like anything but what he was--the comet of the newspaper
firmament.

'What are you doing here?' he asked--The manner was aggressive and
dictatorial, and I resented it.

'Is that your business?' I retorted.

'Who are you?' he asked. I told him that I was the representative of the
_Birmingham Morning News_, but questioned his right to the information.

'Look here, young man,' he said; 'there's only one spare room in that
cottage, and it belongs to me. I've rented it from the woman of the
house for a pound a week.'

'And I have rented it,' I answered, 'from the woman's husband for a
pound a week.'

'Well,' said the great man with much composure, 'if I find you there I
shall chuck you out of window.'

I told him that that was a game which two might play at; at which he
burst into a great laugh and clapped me on the shoulder. We agreed to
take bed and sofa on alternate nights, and there the matter ended; but
I found out my rival's name, and would have been willing, in the
enthusiasm of my hero-worship, to resign anything to him. Anything, that
is to say, but my own ambitions as a journalist and the interests of the
_Morning News_.

Here was a chance indeed. Here was a foeman worthy of any man's steel.
To beat Archibald Forbes would be, as it seemed then, to crown oneself
with everlasting glory, and I was not altogether without hope of
doing it. For one thing, I was native to the country-side. I spoke the
dialect, and that was a great matter. Forbes was incomprehensible to
half the men, and three-fourths of what they said was incomprehensible
to him. There was to be a descent and an attempt at rescue on the
midnight of the third day after the breaking in of the waters, and I had
secured permission to accompany the party.

I hired a horse at a livery-stable at Walsall, and had him kept in
readiness in the back yard of a beerhouse. My giant enemy, after
maintaining a strict watch on matters for eight-and-forty hours at a
stretch, had gone to bed at last, convinced that nothing could be done.
It was a dreadful night, and not an easy matter for one unaccustomed
to the place to find his way to the pit's mouth. The iron cages of fire
that burned there in the windy rain