Their keep would be a serious item. He must have more money.
How to get it? Harder work was the obvious answer. Labor had no terrors
for Banneker. Mentally he was a hardened athlete, always in training.
Being wise and self-protective, he did no writing on his day off. But
except for this period of complete relaxation, he gave himself no
respite. Any morning which did not find him writing in his den, after a
light, working breakfast, he put in at the Library near by, insatiably
reading economics, sociology, politics, science, the more serious
magazines, and always the news and comments of the day. He was possessed
of an assertive and sane curiosity to know what was going on in the
world, an exigence which pressed upon him like a healthy appetite, the
stimulus of his hard-trained mental condition. The satisfaction of this
demand did not pay an immediate return; he obtained little or no actual
material to be transmuted into the coin of so-much-per-column, except as
he came upon suggestions for editorial use; and, since his earlier
experience of The Ledger's editorial method with contributions (which he
considered light-fingered), he had forsworn this medium. Notwithstanding
this, he wrote or sketched out many an editorial which would have
astonished, and some which would have benefited, the Inside Room where
the presiding genius, malicious and scholarly, dipped his pen
alternately into luminous ether and undiluted venom. Some day, Banneker
was sure, he himself was going to say things editorially.

His opinion of the editorial output in general was unflattering. It
seemed to him bound by formalism and incredibly blind to the immense and
vivid interest of the news whereby it was surrounded, as if a man, set
down in a meadow full of deep and clear springs, should elect to drink
from a shallow, torpid, and muddy trickle. Legislation, taxes,
transportation problems, the Greatness of Our City, our National Duty
(whatever it might be at the time--and according to opinion), the drink
question, the race problem, labor and capital; these were the reiterated
topics, dealt with informatively often, sometimes wittily, seldom
impartially. But, at best, this was but the creaking mechanism of the
artificial structure of society, and it was varied only by an occasional
literary or artistic sally, or a preachment in the terms of a convinced
moralization upon the unvarying text that the wages of sin is death. Why
not a touch of humanism, now