tum
for a week, and my three dollars carried on the concern.

When he returned, he generously gave me a dollar, and said that he had
spoken of me to the Water-Gas Company as a capital secretary. Then he
wrote me a pass for the Arch Street Theatre, and told me, benevolently,
to go off and rest that night.

For a month or more the responsibility of the _Chameleon_ devolved
almost entirely upon me. Child that I was, knowing no world but my own
vanity, and pleased with those who fed its sensitive love of approbation
rather than with the just and reticent, I harbored no distrust till one
day when Axiom visited the office, and I was drawing my three dollars
from the treasurer, I heard Mr. Watch exclaim, within the publisher's
room--

"Did you read my article on the Homestead Bill?"

"Yes," answered Axiom; "it was quite clever; your leaders are more alive
and epigrammatic than they were."

I could stand it no more. I bolted into the office, and cried--

"The article on the Homestead Bill is mine, so is every other article in
to-day's paper. Mr. Watch does not tell the truth; he is ungenerous!"

"What's this, Watch?" said Axiom.

"Alfred," exclaimed Mr. Watch, majestically, "adopts my suggestions very
readily, and is quite industrious. I recommend that we raise his salary
to five dollars a week. That is a large sum for a lad."

That night the manuscript was overhauled in the composing room. Watch's
dereliction was manifest; but not a word was said commendatory of my
labor; it was feared I might take "airs," or covet a further increase of
wages. I only missed Watch's hugh pearl, and heard that he had been
discharged, and was myself taken from the drudgery of the scissors, and
made a reporter.

All this was very recent, yet to me so far remote, that as I recall it
all, I wonder if I am not old, and feel nervously of my hairs. For in
the five intervening years I have ridden at Hoe speed down the groove of
my steel-pen.

The pen is my traction engine; it has gone through worlds of fancy and
reflection, dragging me behind it; and long experience has given it so
great facility, that I have only to fire up, whistle, and fix my
couplings, and away goes my locomotive with no end of cars in train.

Few journalists, beginning at the bottom, do not weary of the ladder ere
they climb high. Few of such, or of others more enthusiastic, recall the
early associations of "the office" with pleasure. Yet there is no world
more grote