comet, and "flip" onto the end of the fire-waggon. Then he would turn
slowly around, raise a hand, and wiggle his fingers patronisingly at the
girls in front of the Racket Store as he flew past, swaying his body
with the motion of the rolling, staggering cart.

Other reporters who have been on the paper--the good ones as well as the
bad--have had to run the gauntlet of the town jokers who delight to give
green reporters bogus news, or start them out hunting impossible items.
But the man who soberly told the Young Prince that O. F. C. Taylor was
visiting at the home of the town drunkard, or that W. H. McBreyer had
accepted a position in a town drug-store, only got a wink and a grin
from the boy. Neither did the town wags fool him by giving him a birth
announcement from the wrong family, nor a wedding where there was none.
He was wise as a serpent. Where he got his wisdom, no one knows. He had
the town catalogued in a sort of rogues' directory--the liars and the
honest men set apart from one another, and it was a classification that
would not have tallied with the church directories nor with the town
blue-book nor with the commercial agency's reports. The sheep and the
goats in the Young Prince's record would have been strangers to one
another if they could have been assembled as he imagined them. But he
was generally right in his estimates of men. He had a sixth sense for
sham.

The Young Prince had the sense to know the truth and the courage to
write it. This is the essence of the genius that is required to make a
good newspaper man. No paper has trouble getting reporters who can hand
in copy that records events from the outside. Any blockhead can go to a
public meeting and bring in a report that has the words "as follows"
scattered here and there down the columns. But the reporter who can go
and bring back the soul of the meeting, the real truth about it--what
the inside fights meant that lay under the parliamentary politenesses of
the occasion; who can see the wires that reach back of the speakers, and
see the man who is moving the wires and can know why he is moving them;
who can translate the tall talking into history--he is a real reporter.
And the Young Prince was that kind of a youth. He went to the core of
everything; and if we didn't dare print the truth--as sometimes we did
not--he grumbled for a week about his luck. As passionately as he loved
his clothes, he was always ready to get them dirty in the intere