glimpses of the more unusual happenings in their lives. You
may, or may not, emerge from this experience a better writer than you
were when you went in. Your style may become simpler and more forceful
by newspaper training. Or it may become tawdry, sloppy and inane.

"Newspapers," observed Charles Lamb, "always excite curiosity. No one
ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment." That was true a
hundred years ago, and appears to be just as true to-day.

Fortunately, the men who write the news get more out of the work than do
their readers. The reporter usually can set down only a fraction of the
interesting facts that he picks up about a "story." His work may be
eternally disappointing to the public, but it is rarely half so dull to
the man who does the writing.

No life into which the average modern can dip is so rich in interest for
the first year or two as that of the reporter working upon general
assignments. A fling at hobo life, ten voyages at sea and more than two
years of army life (a year and a half of this time spent in trekking all
over the shattered landscape of France) do not shake my conviction that
the adventurer most to be envied in our times is the cub reporter
enjoying the first thrills and glamors of breaking into print. There is
a scent in the air, which, though it be only ink and paper, makes the
cub's blood course faster the minute he steps into the office corridor;
and as he mounts the stairs to the local room the throbbing of the
presses makes him wonder if this is not literally the "heart of the
city."

He makes his rounds of undertakers' shops, courtrooms, army and navy
recruiting offices, railway stations, jails, markets, clubs, police and
fire headquarters. He is sent to picnics and scenes of murders. He is
one of the greenest of novices in literary adventure, but, quite like an
H. G. Wells, he meets in his community "philosophers, scientific men,
soldiers, artists, professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich,
the great."

He is underpaid and overworked. He has no time to give his writings
literary finish; and, in the end, unless he develops either into a
specialist or an executive, he may wear himself out in hard service and
be cast upon the scrap heap. At first, the life is rich and varied.
Then, after a while, the reporter finds his interest growing jaded. The
same kind of assignment card keeps cropping up for him, day after day.
He perceives that he is in a rut.