good.
This is Newport, and I have come down to see the surf. Pray, do not
remind me of hot hours in a newspaper office, the click of a Morse
dispatch, and work far into the midnight!"

So I left Mr. Pratt, of the Newport _Mercury_, with an ostentation of
affront, and bade James Brady, the boatman, hoist sail and carry me over
to Dumpling Rocks.

On the grassy parapet of the crumbling tower which once served the
purposes of a fort, the transparent water hungering at its base, the
rocks covered with fringe spotting the channel, the ocean on my right
hand lost in its own vastness, and Newport out of mind save when the
town bells rang, or the dip of oars beat in the still swell of
Narragansett,--I lay down, chafing and out of temper, to curse the
only pleasurable labor I had ever undertaken.

To me all places were workshops: the seaside, the springs, the summer
mountains, the cataracts, the theatres, the panoramas of islet-fondled
rivers speeding by strange cities. I was condemned to look upon them all
with mercenary eyes, to turn their gladness into torpid prose, and speak
their praises in turgid columns. Never nepenthe, never _abandonne_,
always wide-awake, and watching for saliences, I had gone abroad like a
falcon, and roamed at home like a hungry jackal. Six fingers on my hand,
one long and pointed, and ever dropping gall; the ineradicable stain
upon my thumb; the widest of my circuits, with all my adventure, a
paltry sheet of foolscap; and the world in which I dwelt, no place for
thought, or dreaminess, or love-making,--only the fierce, fast, flippant
existence of news!

And with this inward execration, I lay on Dumpling Rocks, looking to
sea, and recalled the first fond hours of my newspaper life.

To be a subject of old Hoe, the most voracious of men, I gave up the
choice of three sage professions, and the sweet alternative of idling
husbandry.

The day I graduated saw me an _attache_ of the Philadelphia _Chameleon_.
I was to receive three dollars a week and be the heir to lordly
prospects. In the long course of persevering years I might sit in the
cushions of the night-editor, or speak of the striplings around me as
"_my_ reporters."

"There is nothing which you cannot attain," said Mr. Axiom, my
employer,--"think of the influence you exercise!--more than a clergyman;
Horace Greeley was an editor; so was George D. Prentice; the first has
just been defeated for Congress; the last lectured last night and go