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.

But he saw through it. I don't know how he managed to convey to me that
my delicacy needn't suffer. Anyhow, he must have had some scruples of his
own, since he waited for another context before remarking quietly that
what I was doing now he would be doing in another six months. (And he
was.) These things, he said, took time, and he gave himself six months.
(Yes; in less than six months he was holding me up, again, in my own
paper. I had to wait till he was "out" before I could get in.) He didn't
seem to boast so much as to trace for my benefit the path of some natural
force, some upward-tending, indestructible Energy that happened to be
him.

All this I remember. But I cannot remember by what stages we arrived at
dining together, as we did that night in a little restaurant in Soho.