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
another, he became more and more convinced of it, and more and
more devoted to it. He was twenty then, and he was now
twenty-three, and in that time had become a great reporter,
and had been to Presidential conventions in Chicago,
revolutions in Hayti, Indian outbreaks on the Plains, and
midnight meetings of moonlighters in Tennessee, and had seen