e not unfriendly, for by mail I had sold to them before.
But now we could not "land."

On Christmas Day there was a dismal storm. Our purses were almost flat,
and my box from home failed to arrive. To get up an appetite for dinner
that night we went for a walk in a joy killing blizzard. I wanted to die
and planned to do so. The only reason I did not jump off of a pier was
the providential intervention of several stiff cocktails. (I am
theoretically a prohibitionist, but grateful to the enemy for having
saved my life.) The black cloud that shut out all sunlight was our
measly total for December--$18.07.

One glimmer of hope remained in a growing suspicion that perhaps some of
the "stories" we had submitted had seen print shortly before we
arrived. Possibly some other free lances--I would now estimate the
number as somewhere between nine hundred and a thousand--had gone over
the island of Manhattan with a fine tooth comb? I began haunting the
side streets to seek out the most hidden possibilities, and ended in
triumph one afternoon in a little uptown bird store.

For two hours the young woman who was the proprietor of the store
submitted to a searching interview, and I emerged with enough material
for a full page spread. Then, taking no chances of being turned down
because the contribution was too long, I condensed the "story" into a
column. The manuscript went to the Sunday Editor of the New York _Sun_,
with a letter pleading that "just this once" he grant me the special
favor of a note to explain why he would not be able to use what I had to
offer.

"Well enough written," he scribbled on the rejection slip, "but Miss
Virginia has been done too many times before."

With that a great light dawned. Further investigation discovered that we
had run into the same difficulty on numerous other occasions. We
newcomers had no notion of how thoroughly and often the city had been
pillaged for news. We could not tell old stuff from new. Manhattan
Island is, indeed, the most perilous place in all America for the green
and friendless free lance to attempt to earn a living. There is a
wonderful abundance of "stories," but nearly all of them that the eye of
the beginner can detect have been marketed before. Any other island but
Manhattan! When dog days came around, I took a vacation on Bois Blanc in
the Straits of Mackinac, and found more salable "stories" along its
thinly populated shores than Manhattan had been able to furnish in