The boy was taken by an old Italian woman. In after years he could not
determine the length of time that he had lived in her wretched home,
but with vivid brightness dwelled in his memory the morning when he
ran away and found a free if not an easy life in the newsboys'
lodging-house. He sold newspapers, he went to a night school, and as
he grew older he picked up "river items" for an afternoon newspaper.
His hope was that he might become a "professional journalist," as
certain young men termed themselves; and study, which in an
ill-lighted room, tuned to drowsiness by the buzzing of youthful
mumblers, might have been a chafing task to one who felt not the rowel
of a spurring ambition, was to him a pleasure full of thrilling
promises. To him the reporter stood at the high-water mark of
ambition's "freshet." But when years had passed and he had scrambled
to that place he looked down and saw that his height was not a dizzy
one. And instead of viewing a conquered province, he saw, falling from
above, the shadows of trials yet to be endured. He worked faithfully,
and at one time held the place of city editor, but a change in the
management of the paper not only reduced him to the ranks, but, as the
saying went, set him on the sidewalk. Then he wrote "specials." His
work was bright, original and strong, and was reproduced throughout
the country, but as it was not signed, the paper alone received the
credit. Year after year he lived in this unsettled way--reading in the
public library, musing at his own fireside, catching glimpses of an
important work which the future seemed to hold, and waiting for the
outlines of that work to become more distinct; but the months went by
and the plan of the work remained in the shadow of the coming years.

DeGolyer had now reached that time of life when a wise man begins
strongly to suspect that the past is but a future stripped of its