hree kinds of newspaper
men. There were the hacks, very able fellows, some of them, but mostly
given to bar and taproom life; there were thoroughly well qualified,
widely informed, sober pressmen of the middle sort, who often spent
their whole lives in one employ; and there were literary men,
frequently of high scholarly attainments, who wrote for newspapers.
To-day, there are not very many representatives of these three
divisions. The modern host of journeymen, with their captains, keen
men of business, may represent a great advance upon their
predecessors. Since I am told we live in an age of wonderfully rapid
progress, I suppose they must. They certainly are different. To
realise this fully one has only to come in contact, once, with one of
the few surviving practitioners of the earlier type. They stand out
like trees in--shall I say?--a flower-bed.

Ignorance of journalistic conditions and requirements, combined with a
foolish sort of personal sensitiveness or vanity, had more to do with
my early hardships and difficulties than anything in the quality of my
work. In the light of practical knowledge acquired later I see that I
might with ease have earned at least five times the amount of money I
did earn in those first years by doing about half the amount of work I
did, and--knowing how to dispose of it. I concentrated my entire stock
of youthful energy upon writing and reading, and really worked very
hard indeed. That, I thought, was my business. Some vague, benevolent
power, 'the World,' I suppose, was to see to it that I got my reward.
My part was to do the work. Good work might be trusted to bring its
own reward. And, in any case, I asked no more than that I should be
able to live with decency and go on with my work. I no longer had the
faintest sort of interest in the idea of saving money. That ambition
died with the end of my saving days in Sydney. I never thought about
it at all. It simply had ceased to exist.

Well, my work, as a matter of fact, was not at all bad, and it was
amazingly abundant. I would wager I wrote not less than three hundred
articles, sketches, and stories during my first year, probably more,
and always in the most hostile and unsuitable sort of environments.
And my reward in that first year was slightly less than twenty pounds
sterling, something well below an average of two guineas each month. I
suppose I might have starved in that first year if I had not had some
twenty pounds in hand