s values than a rabbit. He had the most
amazing faculty for overlooking what was vital in the news, but he could
always be depended upon to pick out some trivial and inconsequential
detail and dress it up with about half a yard of old-point lace
adjectives. He never by any chance used a short word if he could dig up
a long, hard one, and he never seemed to be able to start a story
without a quotation from one of the poets. It never was a modern poet
either. Excepting for Sidney Lanier and Father Ryan, apparently he
hadn't heard of any poet worth while since Edgar Allan Poe died. And
everything that happened seemed to remind him--at great length--of
something else that had happened between 1861 and 1865. When it came to
lugging the Civil War into a tale, he was as bad as that character in
one of Dickens' novels who couldn't keep the head of King Charles the
First out of his literary productions. With that reared-back,
flat-heeled, stiff-spined gait of his, he would go rummaging round the
hotels and the Shawnee Club, meeting all sorts of people and hearing all
sorts of things that a real reporter would have snatched at like a
hungry dog snatching at a T-bone, and then he would remember that it
was the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Kenesaw Mountain, or
something, and, forgetting everything else, would come bulging and
bustling back to the office, all worked up over the prospect of writing
two or three columns about that. He just simply couldn't get the
viewpoint; yet I think he tried hard enough. I guess the man who said
you couldn't teach an old dog new tricks had particular reference to an
old war dog.

I remember mighty well one incident that illustrates the point I am
trying to make. We had a Sunday edition. We were rather vain of our
Sunday edition. It carried a colored comic supplement and a section full
of special features, and we all took a more or less righteous pride in
it and tried hard to make it alive and attractive. We didn't always
succeed, but we tried all right. One Saturday night we put the Sunday to
bed, and about one o'clock, when the last form was locked, three or four
of us dropped into Tony's place at the corner for a bite to eat and a
drink. We hadn't been there very long when in came the old major, and at
my invitation he joined us at one of Tony's little round tables at the
back of the place. As a general thing the major didn't patronize Tony's.
I had never heard him say so--probably he wo