s of faith in me, I realized that the fear
of her equally high-flown scorn had more than once kept me from
abandoning my project. With pride I enclosed in my letter my account
of the funeral of Mr. Weinberg, though I refrained from marring the
trophy with an explanation that this first public production of my pen
had been allowed to attain the length of a column because his store
covered half a block and his advertisements many pages of _The Record_.
As a trophy Gladys Todd received it. Declaring that she lacked words
in which to express her pride in her knight, she flew to greater
heights than ever before. She had placed my first journalistic effort
in a scrap-book, and all that I wrote was to be preserved in like
manner. I must send her every published line that came from my pen.
Her knight had triumphed in his first real passage at arms, and she
sent to me a chaplet of victory. It came--not a wreath, but a cushion
worked with her own hands, mauve and white, the colors of McGraw, with
'91 in black on one side and on the other the word "Excelsior."

The scrap-book grew rapidly to alarming proportions, for having now my
opportunity I worked hard, and Mr. Hanks was fond of telling me that I
was rapidly outgrowing the reputation Doctor Todd and Mr. Pound had
made for me on Park Row. Accounts of murders, suicides, yacht-races,
robberies, public meetings, railroad accidents--all the varied events
which make up a day's news--followed the funeral into Gladys Todd's
archives. You can readily imagine that my views of life soon underwent
a change. They became rather distorted, as I see them now; and was it
a wonder when my day began at noon and ended in the small hours of the
morning, carried me through hospitals, police-stations, and courts,
from the darkest slums to the stateliest houses on the Avenue, from the
sweatshop to the offices of the greatest financiers. To me all men
were simply makers of news, and by their news value I judged them. A
man's greatness I measured by the probable length of his obituary
notice. Indeed, greatness itself was but the costume of a puppet, so
often did I see the sawdust stuffing oozing from the gashes in the
cloth. When I met one bank cashier simply because he had stolen, I
forgot the thousands of others who were plodding away through lives of
dull honesty. Because one Sunday-school superintendent sinned, I
classed all his kind as sinners. Becoming versed in the devious ways
of