would force him to write a readable account of his own entertainment
in the dark meadows. Largely by personal magnetism he had fought his
way upward, and this quality was not less a social gift.

Mr. Toby Amory, who had been on the Eleven with St. George at
Harvard, looked along his pipe at his host and smiled, with
flattering content, his slow smile. Amory's father had lately had a
conspicuous quarter of an hour in Wall Street, as a result of which
Amory, instead of taking St. George to the cemetery at Clusium as he
had talked, himself drifted to Park Row; and although he now knew
considerably less than he had hoped about certain inscriptions, he
was supporting himself and two sisters by really brilliant work, so
that the balance of his power was creditably maintained. Surely the
inscriptions did not suffer, and what then was Amory that he should
object? Presently Holt, the middle-aged marine man, and Harding
who, since he had lost a lightweight sparring championship, was
sporting editor, solemnly entered together and sat down with the
social caution of their class. So did Provin, the "elder giant," who
gathered news as he breathed and could not intelligibly put six
words together. Horace, who would listen to four lines over the
telephone and therefrom make a half-column of American newspaper
humour or American newspaper tears, came in roaring pacifically and
marshaling little Bud, that day in the seventh heaven of his first
"beat." Then followed Crass, the feature man, whose interviews were
known to the new men as literature, although he was not above
publicly admitting that he was not a reporter, but a special writer.
Mr. Crass read nothing in the paper that he had not written, and St.
George had once prophesied that in old age he would use his
scrap-book for a manual of devotions, as Klopstock used his
_Messiah_. With him arrived Carbury, the telegraph editor, and later