waited nonchalantly on the corner near the fire-department house, and as the crowds parted to let the horses dash by on the dead run, he would walk calmly to the middle of the street, put his notebook in his pocket, and, as the fire-team plunged by, he would ostentatiously throw out a stiff leg behind him like the tail of a comet, and "flip" onto the end of the fire-waggon. Then he would turn slowly around, raise a hand, and wiggle his fingers patronisingly at the girls in front of the Racket Store as he flew past, swaying his body with the motion of the rolling, staggering cart.

Other reporters who have been on the paper—the good ones as well as the bad—have had to run the gauntlet of the town jokers who delight to give green reporters bogus news, or start them out hunting impossible items. But the man who soberly told the Young Prince that O. F. C. Taylor was visiting at the home of the town drunkard, or that W. H. McBreyer had accepted a position in a town drug-store, only got a wink and a grin from the boy. Neither did the town wags fool him by giving him a birth announcement from the wrong family, nor a wedding where there was none. He was wise as a serpent. Where he got his wisdom, no one knows. He had the town catalogued in a sort of rogues' directory—the liars and the honest men set apart from one another, and it was a classification that would not have tallied with the church directories nor with the town blue-book nor with the commercial agency's reports. The sheep and the goats in the Young Prince's record would have been strangers to one another if they could have been assembled as he imagined them. But he was generally right in his estimates of men. He had a sixth sense for sham.

The Young Prince had the sense to know the truth and the courage to write it. This is the essence of the genius that is required to make a good newspaper man. No paper has trouble getting reporters who can hand in copy that records events from the outside. Any blockhead can go to a public meeting and bring in a report that has the words "as follows" scattered here and there down the columns. But the reporter who can go and bring back the soul of the meeting, the real truth about it—what the inside fights meant that lay under the parliamentary politenesses of the occasion; who can see the wires that reach back of the speakers, and see the man who is moving the wires and can know why he is moving them; who can translate the tall talking into history—he is a real reporter. And the Young Prince was that kind of a youth. He went to the core of everything; and if we didn't dare print the truth—as sometimes we did not—he grumbled for a week about his luck. As passionately as he loved his clothes, he was always ready to get them dirty in the interests of his business.

For three years his nimble feet pounded the sidewalks of the town. He knew no business hours, and ate and slept with his work. He never ceased to be a reporter—never took off his make-up, never let down from his exalted part. One day he fell sick of a fever, and for three weeks fretted and fumed in delirium. In his dreams he wrote pay locals, and made trains, and described funerals, got lists of names for the society column, and grumbled because his stuff was cut or left over till the next day. When he awoke he was weak and wan, and they felt that they must tell him the truth.

The doctor took the boy's hands and told him very simply what they feared. He looked at the man for a moment in dumb wonder, and sighed a long, tired sigh. Then he said: "Well, if I must, here goes"—and turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes without a tremor.

And thus the Young Prince went home.

III

The Society Editor

They say that in the newspaper offices of the city men work in ruts; that the editorial writer never reports an item, no matter how much he knows of it; that a reporter is not allowed to express an editorial view of a subject, even though he be well qualified to speak; but on our little country daily newspaper it is entirely different. We work on the interchangeable point system. Everyone writes items, all of us get advertising and job-work when it comes our way, and when one of us writes anything particularly good, it is marked for the editorial page. The religious reporter does the racing matinée in Wildwood Park, and the financial editor who gets the market reports from the feed-store men also gets any church news that comes along.

The only time we ever established a department was when we made Miss Larrabee society editor. She came from the high school, where her graduating essay on Kipling attracted our attention, and, after an office council had decided that a Saturday society page would be a paying proposition.

At first, say for six months after she came to the office, Miss Larrabee devoted herself to the accumulation of professional pride. This pride was as much a part of her life as her pompadour, which at that time was so high that she had to tiptoe to reach it. However she managed to keep it up was the wonder of the office. Finally, we all agreed that she must use chicken-fence. She denied this, but was inclined to be good-natured about it, and, as an office-joke, the boys used to leave a step-ladder by her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really looked. Nothing ruffled her spirits, and we soon quit teasing her and began to admire her work. In addition to filling six columns of the Saturday's paper with her society report in a town where a church social is important enough to justify publishing the names of those who wait on the tables, Miss Larrabee was a credit to the office.

As an office joke the boys used to leave a step-ladder by her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really looked

She was always invited to the entertainments at the homes of the Worthingtons and the Conklins, who had stationary wash-tubs in the basements of their houses, and who ate dinner instead of supper in the evening; and when she put on what the boys called her trotting harness, her silk petticoats rustled louder than any others at the party. One day she suddenly dropped her pompadour and appeared with her hair parted in the middle and doused over her ears in long, undulating billows. No other girl in town came within a quarter of an inch of Miss Larrabee's dare. When straight-fronts became stylish, Miss Larrabee was a vertical marvel, and when she rolled up her sleeves and organized a country club, she referred to her shoes as boots and took the longest steps in town. But with it all she was no mere clothes-horse. We drilled it into her head during her first two weeks that "society" news in a country town means not merely the doings of the cut-glass set, but that it means as well the doings of the Happy Hoppers, the Trundle-Bed Trash, the Knights of Columbus, the Rathbone Sisters, the King's Daughters, the Epworth League, the Christian Endeavourers, the Woman's Relief Corps, the Ladies' Aid and the Home Missionary Societies, Miss Nelson's Dancing Class, the Switchmen's annual ball—if we get their job-work—and every kindred, every tribe, except such as gather in what is known as "kitchen sweats" and occasionally send in calls for the police. When Miss Larrabee got this into her head she began to groan under her burden, and by the end of the year, though she had great pride in her profession, she affected to loathe her department.

Weddings were her especial abominations. When the first social cloud appeared on the horizon indicating the approach of a series of showers for the bride which would culminate in a cloudburst at some stone church, Miss Larrabee would begin to rumble like distant thunder and, as the storm grew thicker, she would flash out crooked