my editor (whom I do not remember, by the way, ever to have
seen); but at least I did a good share of his work for nothing. I have
addressed larger audiences since then; but I have certainly never
been puffed up with such a sense of my own power and value as I had in
writing those pompous, boyish essays, in which I trounced Disraeli, and
instructed Gladstone and the chairman of the local Board of Guardians in
the art of administration.

I have always held that there is no training for a novelist like that
of a journalist. The man who intends to write books describing life
can hardly begin better than by plunging into that boiling, bubbling,
seething cauldron called journalism. The working journalist is found
everywhere. Is there a man to be hanged?--the working journalist is
present. Exhibitions, processions, coronations, wars, whatever may be
going on, wherever the interest of life is richest and the pulse beats
fastest, there you find the working journalist. There is no experience
in the world which really qualifies a man to take a broad, a sane, an
equable view of life in such a degree as journalism.

When first I joined the Press, I took a berth as junior reporter at 25s.
per week. I went to George Dawson--one of the highest types of men I
have ever known, but one who was a born idle man and loved to talk and
talk, and so left no record of himself--I went to dear old Dawson and
said, "You are starting a journal, and I want to be on it." What is
the bottom rung of the ladder? Well, my work was to report police court
cases and inquests. I do not know of a lower rung. I had ambitions and
ideas of my own, but I went for whatever came in my way, and I have not
repented it until this day, although a good opening into business life
awaited me if I chose to accept it in preference.

Almost the first "big thing" I recall in my experience was the first
private execution which took place in the English provinces. It was at
Worcester, when a man named Edmund Hughes, plasterer's labourer, was
hanged for the murder of his wife. I have often thought that if that
man's story had only been rightly told, if there had only been a modern
Shakespeare round about, there was the making of a new tragedy of
Othello in it. His wife had run away with her paramour no fewer than
three times, and each time he had followed her and fetched her back. But
the last time she refused to come back and cruelly mocked him. He left
her, saying that he wo