ement of public
utilities in a small town, for _Collier's_.

A character sketch about a local philanthropic money lender, for
_Leslie's_ and the Kansas City _Star_.

An account of the Kansas Amish, a sect something like the Tolstoys, for
Kansas City, St. Louis and New York newspapers.

Short Sunday specials about a $40,000 hospital and a thoroughly modern
Kansas farm house for Kansas City and St. Louis Sunday sections.

The profits of these excursions were not always immediate, and until
after I had worked many weeks at the trade there were periods of
serious financial embarrassment. To cite profitable trips too early is
to get ahead of my story, but the time is none the less propitious to
remark that a country town or a small city certainly is as good a place
for the free lance to operate (once he knows a "story" when he sees it)
as is New York or Chicago, Boston, New Orleans or San Francisco. I often
wonder if I would not have been better off financially if I had kept on
working from a Kansas City headquarters instead of emigrating to the
East.

I might have gone on this way for a long time, in contentment, for my
profits were steadily mounting and my markets extending. But one day my
wanderings extended as far as Chicago, and there I ran across an old
friend of student days. He had been the cartoonist of the college
magazine when I was its editor. He wore, drooping from one corner of his
face, a rah-rah bulldog pipe; an enormous portfolio full of enormities
of drawing was under one arm, and, dangling at the end of the other, was
one of the tiniest satchels that ever concealed a nightgown.

In answer to questions about what he was doing with himself, he
confessed that he was not making out any better than most other newly
graduated students of art. I argued that if Chicago did not treat him
considerately, he ought to head for New York, where real genius, more
than likely, would be more quickly appreciated. Also, if this was to his
liking, I would invite myself to go along with him.

We went. Now sing, O Muse, the slaughter!

CHAPTER VI

IN NEW YORK'S "FLEET STREET"

The inexperienced free lance who attempts to invade New York, as we did,
with no magazine reputation and no friends at court among the experts of
the periodical market, may be assured that he will receive a surprising
amount of courtesy. But this courtesy is likely to be administered to
help soften the blows of a series of disappointmen