now now in the light
of fuller experience, but I must say that as a prophet he was fairly
accurate. The major did have a hard time living on his salary--it was
twelve a week, I learned--and as a reporter he certainly was not what
you would call a dazzling success. He came on for duty at eight the next
morning, the same as the rest of us, and sorry as I felt for him I had
to laugh. He had bought himself a leather-backed notebook as big as a
young ledger, just as a green kid just out of high school would have
done, and he had a long, new, shiny, freshly sharpened lead pencil
sticking out of the breast pocket of his coat. He tried to come in
smartly with a businesslike air, but it wouldn't have fooled a blind
man, because he was as nervous as a debutante. It struck me as one of
the funniest things--and one of the most pathetic--I had ever seen.

I'll say this for Devore--he tried out the major on nearly every kind of
job; and surely it wasn't Devore's fault that the major failed on every
single one of them. His first attempt was as typical a failure as any of
them. That first morning Devore assigned him to cover a wedding at high
noon, high noon being the phrase we always used for a wedding that took
place round twelve o'clock in the day. The daughter of one of the
wealthiest merchants in the town, and also one of our largest
advertisers, was going to be married to the first deputy cotillion
leader of the German Club, or something of that nature. Anyhow the groom
was what is known as prominent in society, and the chief wanted a spread
made of it. Devore sent the major out to cover the wedding, and when he
came back told him to write about half a column.

He wrote half a column before he mentioned the bride's name. He started
off with an eight-line quotation from Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake,
and then he went into a long, flowery dissertation on the sacred rite or
ceremony of matrimony, proving conclusively and beyond the peradventure
of a doubt that it was handed down to us from remote antiquity. And he
forgot altogether to tell the minister's name, and he got the groom's
middle initial wrong--he was the kind of groom who would make a fuss
over a wrong middle initial, too--and along toward the end of his story
he devoted about three closely-written pages to the military history of
the young woman's father. It seems that her parent had served with
distinction as colonel of a North Carolina regiment. And he wound up
with