o.
By permission of Mrs. Jacob A. Riis and of the publishers.]

When at last I got well enough to travel, I set my face toward the east,
and journeyed on foot through the northern coal regions of Pennsylvania by
slow stages, caring little whither I went, and earning just enough by
peddling flat-irons to pay my way. It was spring when I started; the autumn
tints were on the leaves when I brought up in New York at last, as nearly
restored as youth and the long tramp had power to do. But the restless
energy that had made of me a successful salesman was gone. I thought only,
if I thought at all, of finding some quiet place where I could sit and see
the world go by that concerned me no longer. With a dim idea of being sent
into the farthest wilds as an operator, I went to a business college on
Fourth Avenue and paid $20 to learn telegraphing. It was the last money I
had. I attended the school in the afternoon. In the morning I peddled
flat-irons, earning money for my board, and so made out.

One day, while I was so occupied, I saw among the "want" advertisements in
a newspaper one offering the position of city editor on a Long Island City
weekly to a competent man. Something of my old ambition stirred within me.
It did not occur to me that city editors were not usually obtained by
advertising, still less that I was not competent, having only the vaguest
notions of what the functions of a city editor might be. I applied for the
job, and got it at once. Eight dollars a week was to be my salary; my job,
to fill the local column and attend to the affairs of Hunter's Point and
Blissville generally, politics excluded. The editor attended to that. In
twenty-four hours I was hard at work writing up my then most ill-favored
bailiwick. It is none too fine yet, but in those days, when every nuisance
crowded out of New York found refuge there, it stunk to heaven.

Certainly I had entered journalism by the back door, very far back at that,
when I joined the staff of the _Review_. Signs of that appeared speedily,
and multiplied day by day. On the third day of my employment I beheld the
editor-in-chief being thrashed down the street by an irate coachman whom he
had offended, and when, in a spirit of loyalty, I would have cast in my lot
with him, I was held back by one of the printers with the laughing comment
that that was his daily diet and that it was good for him. That was the
only way any one ever got any satisfaction or anything els