The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-06-25

he'd been out of work for some weeks and was shy on change. l handed him a dollar
 He got back 10 the office at a quar- fer os two. with a vacant look on his face. He sat down at the machine and
 began hitting three keys at once. He
 had just one dollars worth of rum in him. and was 9 dollars worth drunk, which was plenty.
 "I gave him the sudden sack. of course. and there was three business
 days correspondence tied up in short
 hand notebooks, with no visible chance
 of ever getting the notes interpreted.
 II telegraphed to another of the can ddatEs whose names and addresses I had written down. ! just took the list ill rotation. and this time ii was a young
 woman. Then had to take off my coat and vest and jump into that cOrrespOn- dence with q pen again. and put in an- ! other afternoon of drudgery gettig off l replies to those of my letters that re quired immediate attention. The girl I'd wired for arrived about half an hour after business began on
 Wednesday morning. She was a pretty
 gidl, but sine didn't look well. There was pained look on her face, with cir 1 cles beneath her eyes.
 She explained the tardiness of her arrival by saying that she had had a
 violent headache all the morning. I
 told her I didn't think she would be equal to a hard days work, but she as4 was subject to headaches and never stopped work on account of them. wasn't particularly confident. however, sured me that she would be-that she when ! asked her 10 get her notebook 1 ready.
 First I handed her the notebook of the young man who had got jagged on
 my hands on the day before, and asked her if she could read the notes. I en- tertained q sort of wistful hope, you see, | that perhaps she might be able to tran
 scribe that big bunch of notes and save me the measly job of dictating them all
 over again. But that was a sad pipe dream on my part. The notes were
 quite unintelligible to her, and she said
 it was an entirely different shorthand system from hers.
 Well, that girl was all right and could read her notes after taking them, but just when I was coming down the l homestretch on the dictation. shortly
 before noon, she collapsed and fainted.
 I had to hustle to the office next door
 to get the girl stenographer there to come and attend to the young woman, land I was barred out of my office for
 about half an hour while the young wo-
 man was coming round.
 II told her that didn't think she was strong enough to work for awhile and sent her home ill a cab the poor young
 'un looking as pale as sheet. That
 meant another nifty afternoon of pen
 manship for me, and again I got home to dinner so late, as had been for the two days previous, that my wife looked
 me over out of the tail of her eye and made sarcastic remarks about the won- derufl way my business seemed to be picking up, seeing that it kept me at the
 office until all hours of the night, and
 other irritating stuff of that sort. "I wired that afternoon, after the fainting young woman had been carried
 away, for the next applicant on my lit tie ust-this time it was man. He
 sailed along on time on Thursday morn ing, and at last thought had picked a winner.
 He was an athletic-looking young l fellow, well set up, with no rum marks about him, and the way he could write shorthand was a caution. I talked at
 him just as fast as could think in get ting through my letters-some of which I was dictating for the fourth time
 but he could just let his pencil loaf and
 get everything said without half try ing.
 Tt looked too easy to be true, but when I called upon him to read his
 notes he rattled them off as if they had
 been printed matter on three-sheet posters.
 "T'Il have to be giving thus cub more money shortly than I told him I'd pay him. said to myself as I raced through that accumulated stack of correspond ence. He's stake class, and I won't be able to hold him if I don't hunch the wages along little