l here was that the latter
months of the period preceding our supposedly triumphal entry had seen
me arrive at the point of earning almost as much money at free lancing
as I could have made as a reporter. Meantime, I had thrilled to see my
name affixed to contributions in _Collier's_, _Leslie's_, _Outlook_ and
_Outing_, not to mention a few lesser magazines. I thought I knew a
"story" when I saw one. I knew how to take photographs and prepare a
manuscript for marketing, and New York newspapers and magazines had been
treating me handsomely. What we did not realize was that while the New
York markets were hospitable enough to western material, they required
no further assistance in reporting the activities of Manhattan Island.
We had moved away from our gold mine.

Our home and workshop now was a cubbyhole so small that every piece of
furniture in the place was in close proximity to something else. My
battered desk was jam against my roommate's drawing table, and his chair
backed against a bed. Then, except for a narrow aisle to the door, there
was a chair which touched another bed, which touched a trunk; the trunk
touched ends with a washstand, which was jam against a false mantel
pasted onto the wall, and the mantel was in juxtaposition with a bureau
which poked me in the back. The window looked south, and adjacent
buildings allowed it to have sunlight for almost half an hour a day.

Yet it would have been a cheerful enough place if our mail had not been
so depressing. Everything we sent out came right back with a bounce,
sometimes on the same day that we posted it. With indefatigable zeal we
wrote feature "stories" about big topics in America's biggest city and
furnished illustrations for the text. But the manuscripts did not sell.
For two bitter months we kept at it before we discovered what was wrong.
You may wonder how we could have been so blind. But there was no one to
tell us what to do. We had to find out by experience.

In November our income was $60.90, all of it echoes from the past for
material written in the west.

"How that crowd in the old office would laugh at us when we trailed back
home, defeated!"

That was the thought which was at once a nightmare and a goad to further
desperate effort. Day after day the Art Department and the kodak and I
explored New York's highways and centers of interest. The place was ripe
with barrels and barrels of good "feature stories," and I knew it; and
the markets wer