h drives you almost to despair. Try your 'prentice hand on
contributions to the smaller publications. That is the surest way to
"learn while you earn" in free lancing. These humble markets need not
cause you to sneer--particularly if you happen to be a humble beginner.

Every laboratory experiment in manuscript writing and marketing, though
it be only a description of a shop window for a dry goods trade paper,
or an interview with a boss plumber for the _Gas Fitter's Gazette_, will
furnish you with experience in your own trade, and set you ahead a step
on the long road that leads to the most desirable acceptances. The one
thing to watch zealously is your own development, to make sure that you
do not too soon content yourself with achievements beneath your
capabilities. Start with the little magazines, but keep attempting to
attain the more difficult goals.

Meanwhile, you need not apologize to any one for the nature of your
work, so long as it is honest reporting and all as well written as you
know how to make it. Stevenson, one of the most conscientious of
literary artists, declared in a "Letter to a Young Gentleman Who
Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art," that "the first duty in this
world is for a man to pay his way," and this is one of your confessed
purposes while you are serving this kind of journalistic apprenticeship.

Until he arrives, the novice must, indeed, unless he be exceptionally
gifted, "pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who carries the purse.
And if in the course of these capitulations he shall falsify his talent,
it can never have been a strong one, and he will have preserved a better
thing than talent--character. Or if he be of a mind so independent that
he cannot stoop to this necessity, one course is yet open: he can desist
from art, and follow some more manly way of life."

In short, so long as you _keep moving_ toward something worth attaining,
there is nothing to worry about but how to keep from relapsing into
smugness or idleness. The besetting temptation of the free lance is to
pamper himself. He is his own boss, can sleep as late as he likes, go
where he pleases and quit work when the temptation seizes him. As a
result, he usually babies himself and turns out much less work than he
might safely attempt without in the least endangering his health.

When he finds out later how assiduously some of the best known of our
authors keep at their desks he becomes a little ashamed of himself.