We have had many reporters for our little country newspaper--some good
ones, who have gone up to the city and have become good newspaper men;
some bad ones, who have gone back to the livery-stables from which they
sprang; and some indifferent ones, who have drifted into the insurance
business and have become silent partners in student boarding-houses,
taking home the meat for dinner and eating finically at the second table
of life, with a first table discrimination. But of all the boys who have
sat at the old walnut desk by the window, the Young Prince gave us the
most joy. Before he came on the paper he was bell-boy at the National
Hotel--bell-hop, he called himself--and he first attracted our attention
by handing in personal items written in a fat, florid hand. He seemed to
have second sight. He knew more news than anyone else in town--who had
gone away, who was entertaining company, who was getting married, and
who was sick or dying.

The day the Young Prince went to work he put on his royal garment--a
ten-dollar ready-made costume that cost him two weeks' hard work. But it
was worth the effort. His freckled face and his tawny shock of red hair
rose above the gorgeous plaid of the clothes like a prairie sunset, and
as he pranced off down the street he was clearly proud of his job. This
pride never left him. He knew all the switchmen in the railroad yards,
all the girls in the dry-goods stores, all the boys on the grocers'
waggons, all the hack-drivers and all the barbers in town.

These are the great sources of news for a country daily. The reporter
who confines his acquaintance to doctors, lawyers, merchants and
preachers is always complaining of dull days.

But there was never a dull day with the Young Prince. When he could get
the list of "those present" at a social function in no other way, he
called up the hired girl of the festal house--we are such a small town
that only the rich bankers keep servants--and "made a date" with her,
and the names always appeared in the paper the next day; whereupon the
proud hostess, who thought it was bad form to give out the names of her
guests, sent down and bought a dozen extra copies of the paper to send
away to her Eastern kin. He knew all the secrets of the switch shanty.
Our paper printed the news of a change in the general superintendent's
office of the railroad before the city papers had heard of it, and we
usually figured it out that the day after the letter deny