himself to be
quite abandoned, for in the darkest of his hours there stood at his side
Margaret Robertson, whose strong, cheery good sense and whose loyalty to
right-doing helped him and strengthened him and so made it possible to
wait till the better day dawned.

XIV

WHOSOEVER LOOKETH UPON A WOMAN

The Journalistic World has its own diversity of mountain and plain, and
its own variety of inhabitants. There are its mountain ranges and
upland regions of clear skies and pure airs, where are wide outlooks
and horizons whose dim lines fade beyond the reach of clear vision.
Amid these mountain ranges and upon these uplands dwell men among the
immortals to whom has come the "vision splendid" and whose are the
voices that in the crisis of a man or of a nation give forth the call
that turns the face upward to life eternal and divine. To these men such
words as Duty, Honour, Patriotism, Purity, stand for things of intrinsic
value worth a man's while to seek and, having found, to die for.

Level plains there are, too, where harvests are sown and reaped. But
there these same words often become mere implements of cultivation,
tools for mechanical industries or currency for the conduct of
business. Here dwell the practical men of affairs, as they love to call
themselves, for whom has faded the vision in the glare of opportunism.

And far down by the water-fronts are the slum wastes where the sewers of
politics and business and social life pour forth their fetid filth. Here
the journals of yellow shade grub and fatten. In this ooze and slime
puddle the hordes of sewer rats, scavengers of the world's garbage,
from whose collected stores the editor selects his daily mess for the
delectation of the great unwashed, whether of the classes or of the
masses, and from which he grabs in large handfuls that viscous mud that
sticks and stings where it sticks.

The Daily Telegraph was born yellow, a frank yellow of the barbaric type
that despises neutral tints. By the Daily Telegraph things were called
by their uneuphemistic names. A spade was a spade, and mud was mud, and
nothing was sacred from its sewer rats. The highest paid official on its
staff was a criminal lawyer celebrated in the libel courts. Everybody
cursed it and everybody read it. After a season, having thus firmly
established itself in the enmities of the community, and having become,
in consequence, financially secure, it began to aspire toward the
uplands, where