There were six more lines which I have forgotten, but I suppose they gave the reason for this absurd diffidence.

Having written the poem out neatly, Harold put it in an envelope and took it round to The Evening Surprise.  The strain of composition had left him rather weak, and he decided to give his brain a rest for the next few days.  So it happened that he was at the wickets on the following Wednesday afternoon when the commissionaire brought him in the historic letter.  He opened it hastily, the shovel under his arm.

“Dear sir,” wrote the editor of The Surprise, “will you come round and see me as soon as convenient?”

Harold lost no time.  Explaining that he would finish his innings later, he put his coat on, took his hat and stick, and dashed out.

“How do you do?” said the editor.  “I wanted to talk to you about your work.  We all liked your little poem very much.  It will be coming out to-morrow.”

“Thursday,” said Harold helpfully.

“I was wondering whether we couldn’t get you to join our staff.  Does the idea of doing ‘Aunt Miriam’s Cosy Corner’ in our afternoon edition appeal to you at all?”

“No,” said Harold, “not a bit.”

“Ah, that’s a pity.”  He tapped his desk thoughtfully.  “Well then, how would you like to be a war correspondent?”

“Very much,” said Harold.  “I was considered to write rather good letters home from school.”

“Splendid!  There’s this little war in Mexico.  When can you start?  All expenses and fifty pounds a week.  You’re not very busy at the office, I suppose, just now?”

“I could get sick leave easily enough,” said Harold, “if it wasn’t for more than eight or nine months.”

“Do; that will be excellent.  Here’s a blank cheque for your outfit.  Can you get off to-morrow?  But I suppose you’ll have one or two things to finish up at the office first?”

“Well,” said Harold cautiously, “I was in, and I’d made ninety-six.  But if I go back and finish my innings now, and then have to-morrow for buying things, I could get off on Friday.”

“Good,” said the editor.  “Well, here’s luck.  Come back alive if you can, and if you do we shan’t forget you.”

Harold spent the next day buying a war correspondent’s outfit:—­the camel, the travelling bath, the putties, the pith helmet, the quinine, the sleeping-bag, and the thousand-and-one other necessities of active service.  On the Friday his colleagues at the office came down in a body to Southampton to see him off.  Little did they think that nearly a year would elapse before he again set foot upon England.

I shall not describe all his famous coups in Mexico.  Sufficient to say that experience taught him quickly all that he had need to learn; and that whereas he was more than a week late with his cabled account of the first engagement of the war, he was frequently more than a week early afterwards.  Indeed, the battle of Parson’s Nose, so realistically described in his last telegram, is still waiting to be fought.  It is to be hoped that it will be in time for his aptly-named book, With the Mexicans in Mexico, which is coming out next month.