"'I don't want to hurt your feelings at all," said he, 'but you have been two hours about a piece of work that a ready writer would knock off in half an hour, and now it is done it is good for nothing. You make the mistake so many have made before you, that an editor does not need to be bred to his business. _My_ alma mater was a printing-office,' said he, proudly, 'and I crept up the ladder round by round. When I commenced editorial labor, I dropped type-setting, at which I earned two dollars a day, to handle the reporter's pencil at seven dollars a week. If you think you could do anything as a reporter, I'll show you our Mr. Pyke, the local editor.'
"What line?' said I, not exactly understanding.
"'Yes, what line? Speeches, fancy-work, police, sensations, picking up items around town--or what?'
"'I really don't know,' said I; 'I've never had any experience, practically, in the newspaper business.'
"At this Mr. Pyke turned round on me with a queer look in his face.
"'Oh, that's it,' said he; 'you want to work at a trade you haven't served an apprenticeship to. There! it's the old story. If you'll go up in the composing-room, they'll give you a stick and put you to setting type, I reckon. You better try it. Go and ask for our foreman, Mr. Buckingham, and tell him I sent you,--will you? Why, you couldn't tell where the _e_ box is!'
"The man's manner was not so rude as his language, sir. He seemed perfectly good-natured, and was scribbling away with a lead-pencil all the while he was talking, much as if he were a writing-machine."
"Doubtless he is, to a great degree," said I; "that is just where the apprenticeship does its work. I know Pyke, and I've seen him write a column of city matter, carrying on conversations with half-a-dozen different people who dropped in during the time, without interrupting him at all. But I don't mean to interrupt _you_; go on, please."
"Well, sir," St. John continued, "before I had thoroughly learned the lesson that I finally learned so well, I was almost literally penniless. Such had been my high confidence in the easy and prosperous path before me in Chicago, that when I came here I took board at a first-class hotel, with my wife. I had very little money, and one day I waked up to the consciousness that I had less than five dollars remaining of that little, and still no work. Two hideous gulfs yawned before me,--starvation and debt. My horror of the one is scarcely greater than my horror of the other. Debt converted my father from a well-to-do man into a bankrupt, and my mother, who owns the little that is left of our old homestead in Massachusetts, was and is in no condition to help me. I would beg in the streets, sir, before I would look to my poor mother for help, after the long years of self-denial she practised to get me through college. My wife is an orphan. You may judge the color my future was taking on. I left the Tremont House, and, falling at once from the highest to the lowest style of living in apartments, came _here_. I had no confidence left, now, in that future which had before seemed, so foolish and inexperienced was I, a broad and flowery path for talent and education to tread. I never intend to whine over anything in this world if I can help it, but I can assure you this was a pretty dark old world to Brock St. John about that time. The prospect of earning a dollar a day would have cheered me wonderfully. I cared more on account of Aggie than myself, of course. A man can bear ups and downs, kicks, cold shoulders, and an empty stomach, if he is alone; but the thought that I have dragged _her_ down to this is almost unbearable at times."