you must feel in order to write. But you must not feel so keenly that you
can't write. You have to remember always that you're not there to cheer or
sympathise or have emotions, but only to report, to record. You tell what
your eyes see. You'll soon get so that you can and will make good stories
out of your own calamaties."

"Is that a portrait of the editor?" asked Howard, pointing to a grimed
oil-painting, the only relief to the stretch of cracked and streaked white
wall except a few ragged maps.

"That--oh, that is old man Stone--the 'great condenser.' He's there for a
double purpose, as an example of what a journalist should be and as a
warning of what a journalist comes to. After twenty years of fine work at
crowding more news in good English into one column than any other editor
could get in bad English into four columns, he was discharged for
drunkenness. Soon afterwards he walked off the end of a dock one night in a
fog. At least it was said that there was a fog and that he was drunk. I
have my doubts."

"Cheerful! I have not been in the profession an hour but I have already
learned something very valuable."

"What's that?" asked Kittredge, "that it's a good profession to get out
of?"

"No. But that bad habits will not help a man to a career in journalism any
more than in any other profession."

"Career?" smiled Kittredge, resenting Howard's good-humoured irony and
putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the