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