and again, thought Banneker, following the
inevitable parallels in paper after paper; a ray of light striking
through into the life-texture beneath?

By way of experiment he watched the tide of readers, flowing through the
newspaper room of the Public Library, to ascertain what they read. Not
one in thirty paid any attention to the editorial pages. Essaying
farther afield, he attended church on several occasions. His suspicions
were confirmed; from the pulpit he heard, addressed to scanty
congregations, the same carefully phrased, strictly correct comments,
now dealing, however, with the mechanism of another world. The chief
point of difference was that the newspaper editorials were, on the
whole, more felicitously worded and more compactly thought out.
Essentially, however, the two ran parallel.

Banneker wondered whether the editorial rostrum, too, was fated to
deliver its would-be authoritative message to an audience which
threatened to dwindle to the vanishing point. Who read those carefully
wrought columns in The Ledger? Pot-bellied chair-warmers in clubs;
hastening business men appreciative of the daily assurance that
stability is the primal and final blessing, discontent the cardinal sin,
the extant system perfect and holy, and any change a wile of the forces
of destruction--as if the human race had evoluted by the power of
standing still! For the man in the street they held no message. No; nor
for the woman in the home. Banneker thought of young Smith of the yacht
and the coming millions, with a newspaper waiting to drop into his
hands. He wished he could have that newspaper--any newspaper, for a
year. He'd make the man in the street sit up and read his editorials.
Yes, and the woman in the home. Why not the boy and the girl in school,
also? Any writer, really master of his pen, ought to be able to make
even a problem in algebra editorially interesting!

And if he could make it interesting, he could make it pay.... But how
was he to profit by all this hard work, this conscientious technical
training to which he was devoting himself? True, it was improving his
style. But for the purposes of Ledger reporting, he wrote quite well
enough. Betterment here might be artistically satisfactory; financially
it would be fruitless. Already his space bills were the largest,
consistently, on the staff, due chiefly to his indefatigable industry in
devoting every spare office hour to writing his "Eban" sketches, now
paid at