youth up, he finds out before he becomes a reporter that this
is not so, and loses his real value. He should come right out
of the University where he has been doing "campus notes" for
the college weekly, and be pitchforked out into city work
without knowing whether the Battery is at Harlem or Hunter's
Point, and with the idea that he is a Moulder of Public
Opinion and that the Power of the Press is greater than the
Power of Money, 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.