was the same desk which I had so
often approached with trembling in the days when I was breaking spears
with the ancient office-boy and Mr. Hanks. I was fixed now in a chair
opposite Mr. Hanks. I had become an editor. But I was not hurling my
spears against the devils that possess poor man. My principal daily
task was to read the newspapers with a microscopic eye, to glean from
them every hint of news to come and to be covered, to present the
clippings to Mr. Hanks ready for his easy perusal, and though in our
province we had to do only with events of a local character, the life
of the city was so interwoven with that of the whole world that to me
our desk seemed a high lookout tower from which we kept an eye on the
very corners of the globe. Did I look from the smutted window at my
side, it was into the struggling throng on the pavement below or, over
the line of push-carts displaying tawdry wares, into the park where the
riff-raff seemed to reign, because the riffraff was always there,
dozing on the benches. Did I look to the other hand, it was through
the great murky room, through air charged with tobacco smoke and laden
heavily with the fumes of ink, molten lead, and paper which filtered
from the floors below through every open door. In a distant corner, a
gloomy figure in the light of a single lamp, I could see the keeper of
the "morgue" cutting his way through piles of papers, filing away his
printed references to Brown, or Jones, or Robinson, against that day
when Brown might die, Jones commit some crime, or Robinson, perchance,
do something virtuous. I could see, in nearer prospect, the rows of
little desks and the reporters at them, some writing, some reading,
some smoking wearily; some young men fresh from college and keyed high
with ambition; some old men shabbily dressed and carelessly groomed who
had spent their lives at those little desks and asked nothing more than
the privilege of ending them there; some of more corpulent minds, like
the great Bob Carmody, who were happy in the attainment of a life's
ambition to become authorities on base-ball, foot-ball, or rowing.
Wherever I looked I seemed to see nothing but the titanic tread-mill
and to hear the clatter of its cogs: within, where the presses rumbled
deep in the ground below me, where the telegraph clicked in the
adjoining room and overhead the typesetting-machines rattled
incessantly; without, in the medley of the street, the cries of the
hawk