He pants as a man who has run fifty miles--who has overthrown a house. He droops slightly for a moment’s rest, hands on knees, eyes shining with the glare of battle, the gum catching between his grinders. A tab on one of his ears signifies a severe injury to that organ, an injury received in some previous match from an opposition boot-heel, or from a slide over the rough earth with half a dozen of the enemy seated upon him. He has a little, sharp-featured face, squirrel-like, with a Roman nose and eyes set near together. Brief dental gleams illuminate his countenance in his moments of great joyfulness. [Illustration: EDWARD G. RIGGS ] Dana liked Beach’s introduction because the reader need not be a football fan to enjoy it. For the technique of the game he who wished to follow the plays could find all that he wanted in the stories of Fitzgerald and Phillips. In connection with Beach’s literary accomplishments, there is a tradition that another famous _Sun_ reporter of the eighties, Charles M. Fairbanks, was assigned to report one of the great games at Princeton, and, although entirely unacquainted with punts and tackles, came back with a story complete in technical detail, having learned the fine points of football in a few hours. Later, in the early nineties, Fairbanks was night editor of the paper. A _Sun_ man who has been a _Sun_ man from a time to which the memory of man goeth back only with a long pull, is Samuel A. Wood, who has been the _Sun’s_ ship-news man for more than thirty-five years. He is a good example, too, of the _Sun_ man’s anonymity, for although he was the originator of the rhymed news story and his little run-in lyrics have been the admiration of American newspapermen for more than a generation, few persons beyond Park Row have known Wood as the author of them. Although a first-class general reporter, Wood has stuck closely to his favourite topics, the ships and the weather. He made weather news bearable with such bits as this: The sun has crossed the line, and now the weather may be vernal; that is, if no more cyclones come, like yesterday’s, to spurn all the efforts of the spring to come as per the classic rhymers. (Perhaps there was a spring in those days of the good old-timers!) But this spring sprang a fearful leak from clouded dome supernal, and weather that should be divine might be declared infernal; entirely too much chilliness, nocturnal and diurnal, which prompted many citizens to take, for woes external, the ancient spring reviver of the old Kentucky colonel. The mercury fell down the tube a point below the freezing, and Spring herself might be excused for shivering and sneezing. The wind, a brisk northeaster, howled, the sky was dark and solemn, and chills chased one another up and down the spinal column.