An article on gasoline-propelled railway coaches, for The Illustrated World.
A short contribution on scientific municipal management of public utilities in a small town, for Collier's.
A character sketch about a local philanthropic money lender, for Leslie's and the Kansas City Star.
An account of the Kansas Amish, a sect something like the Tolstoys, for Kansas City, St. Louis and New York newspapers.
Short Sunday specials about a $40,000 hospital and a thoroughly modern Kansas farm house for Kansas City and St. Louis Sunday sections.
The profits of these excursions were not always immediate, and until after I had worked many weeks at the trade there were periods of serious financial embarrassment. To cite profitable trips too early is to get ahead of my story, but the time is none the less propitious to remark that a country town or a small city certainly is as good a place for the free lance to operate (once he knows a "story" when he sees it) as is New York or Chicago, Boston, New Orleans or San Francisco. I often wonder if I would not have been better off financially if I had kept on working from a Kansas City headquarters instead of emigrating to the East.
I might have gone on this way for a long time, in contentment, for my profits were steadily mounting and my markets extending. But one day my wanderings extended as far as Chicago, and there I ran across an old friend of student days. He had been the cartoonist of the college magazine when I was its editor. He wore, drooping from one corner of his face, a rah-rah bulldog pipe; an enormous portfolio full of enormities of drawing was under one arm, and, dangling at the end of the other, was one of the tiniest satchels that ever concealed a nightgown.
In answer to questions about what he was doing with himself, he confessed that he was not making out any better than most other newly graduated students of art. I argued that if Chicago did not treat him considerately, he ought to head for New York, where real genius, more than likely, would be more quickly appreciated. Also, if this was to his liking, I would invite myself to go along with him.
We went. Now sing, O Muse, the slaughter!