, and that the few lines he
writes are of more value in the Editor's eyes than is the column of
advertising on the last page, which they are not.

After three years--it is sometimes longer, sometimes not so long--he
finds out that he has given his nerves and his youth and his enthusiasm
in exchange for a general fund of miscellaneous knowledge, the
opportunity of personal encounter with all the greatest and most
remarkable men and events that have risen in those three years, and a
great fund of resource and patience. He will find that he has crowded
the experiences of the lifetime of the ordinary young business man,
doctor, or lawyer, or man about town, into three short years; that he
has learned to think and to act quickly, to be patient and unmoved when
everyone else has lost his head, actually or figuratively speaking; to
write as fast as another man can talk, and to be able to talk with
authority on matters of which other men do not venture even to think
until they have read what he has written with a copy-boy at his elbow
on the night previous.

It is necessary for you to know this, that you may understand what
manner of man young Albert Gordon was.

Young Gordon had been a reporter just three years. He had left Yale
when his last living relative died, and had taken the morning train for
New York, where they had promised him reportorial work on one of the
innumerable Greatest New York Dailies. He arrived at the office at
noon, and was sent back over the same road on which he had just come,
to Spuyten Duyvil, where a train had been wrecked and everybody of
consequence to suburban New York killed. One of the old reporters
hurried him to the office again with his "copy," and after he had
delivered that, he was sent to the Tombs to talk French to a man in
Murderers' Row, who could not talk anything else, but who had shown
some international skill in the use of a jimmy. And at eight, he
covered a flower-show in Madison Square Garden; and at eleven was sent
over the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab to watch a fire and make guesses at
the losses to the insurance companies.

He went to bed at one, and dreamed of shattered locomotives, human
beings lying still with blankets over them, rows of cells, and banks of
beautiful flowers nodding their heads to the tunes of the brass band in
the gallery. He decided when he awoke the next morning that he had
entered upon a picturesque and exciting career, and as one day followed
a