job to job because of his weakness his skill if not by that of younger men it was said that he could drink more and stand it better than any other man in why he can t begin to work unless he s had three or four drinks to him up harry once said to me he has to have six or seven more to get through till evening he did not say how many were required to carry him on until midnight but i fancy he must have consumed at least a half dozen more he was in a constant state of semi which was often concealed during my second month on the was made city editor in place of who had gone to a better paper later he was made managing editor i learned from that he was well known in newspaper circles for his wit his pen and that once he had been considered the most brilliant newspaper editor in st louis he had a small spare intellectual wife very homely and very who still adored him and had suffered ood knows what to be permitted to live with him the first afternoon i saw him sitting in the city chair i was very much afraid of him and of my future he looked and uncouth and had told me that new usually brought in new men as it turned out however much to my astonishment he took an almost im a book about myself fancy to me which into a kind of affection and even if yon will permit me humbly to state a fact a kind of adoration indeed he swelled my head by the genial and hearty manner in which almost at once he took me his guidance and my career as rapidly as he could the while he borrowed as much of my small salary as he could please do not think that i this then or that i do now i owe him more than a dozen such borrowed over a period of years could ever repay my one grief is that i had so little to give him in return for the very great deal he did for me the incident from which this burst of friendship seemed to take its rise was this one day shortly after he arrived he gave me a small concerning a girl on the south side who had run away or had been from one of the homes it has ever been my lot to see the girl was a hardy irish creature of about sixteen a neighborhood street boy had taken her to some wretched in south street and her her mother an old irish catholic woman whom i found bending over a when i called was greatly exercised as to what had become of her daughter of whom she had heard nothing since her the police had been and from picked up by a i learned the facts first mentioned the mother wept into her wash as she told me of the death of her husband a few years before of a boy who had been injured in such a way that he could not work and now this girl her last hope from a newspaper point of view there was nothing much to the story but i decided to follow it to the end i found the house to which the boy had taken the girl but they had just left i found the parents of the youth simple plain working people who knew nothing of his whereabouts something about the wretched little homes of both families the the poverty and which would ill become a pretty girl impelled me to write it out as i saw and felt it i hurried back to the office that afternoon and out a kind of romance which a book about myself in the course of the night seemed to take the office by storm who read it at first then said it was interesting and then fine he at one point as he read you re letting your youthful romantic mood get the best of you i see this will never do bead my boy read the city editor picked it up when he returned intending i presume to see if there was any sign of interest in the general introduction finding something in it to hold him he read on carefully to the end as i could see for i was not a dozen feet away and could see what he was reading when he finished he looked over at me and then called me to come to him i want to say to you he said that you have just done a fine piece of writing i don t go much on this kind of story don t believe in it as a rule for a daily paper but the way you have handled this is fine you re young yet and if you just keep yourself well in hand you have a future thereafter he became very friendly asked me out one lunch time to have a drink borrowed a dollar and told me of some of the charms and wonders of work in st louis and elsewhere he thought the was too small a paper for me that i ought to get on a larger one in another city and suggested how valuable would be a period of work on the st louis of which he had once been city editor you haven t any idea how much you need all this he said you re young and inexperienced and a great paper like the or the new york sun starts a boy off right i would like to see you go first to st louis and then to new york don t settle down anywhere yet don t drink and don t get married whatever you do a wife will be a big to you you have a future 