“Tell me all you know about it, Fenton,” suggested the young man as he sipped his coffee.
“There is very little to tell,” answered his companion as he lighted a cigar and gazed contentedly at the animated face before him. “A newspaper is an insatiable beast. Its maw is never satisfied. It swallows brains, talent, culture, industry, youth, maturity, wit, wisdom, with an appetite that grows with what it feeds upon. It is the hungriest monster the ages have produced, and its food is human lives.”
“What an awful picture!” cried Richard cheerfully. “But what I am after is not the status of a newspaper in the cannibalistic realm, but the reason for my being given a desk in the editorial rooms.”
“That’s what I was coming to, Mr. Impatience. But you must let me get at it in my own way. Let me warn you against impetuosity, boy, and that awful affliction, vulgarly called ‘the big head.’ You have gone up like a rocket. You’ll come down like a stick if you’re not careful. And now, as to the cause of your rise. Know then, my young friend, that in the newspaper field men who can make epigrams are rare. Putting a column of fact into half an inch of fireworks requires a peculiar cast of mind. It may be said of paragraphers, as of poets, that they are born, not made. Now, without knowing it, you gave evidence in several of your news stories that you are the seventh son of a forty-second cousin, and can sound the well of truth with the plummet of a paradox. Mr. Robinson, who is an argus-eyed managing editor, if such a creature ever existed, was attracted by your sparkling generalizations, and made inquiries about you. He sent for me, and I told him that what his editorial page needed, above everything else, was a boy-paragrapher. And there you are.”
Richard laughed. “I am exceedingly obliged to you, Fenton. I have noticed that calling a young man a boy is one of the favorite occupations of men of uncertain age.”
“Well hit, Richard,” cried the elder man, pushing one hand through his iron-gray locks, and motioning with the other to the waiter to refill his liqueur glass; “I like your—your ‘spunk.’ Isn’t that what they call it ‘Down East’? Another thing. You have given me a very conclusive proof that I am fond of you. My age, you know, is my sensitive spot. Isn’t it curious that a man who prides himself on his devotion to pure reason, who glories in the fact that two and two make four, and whose life is spent in the classification of facts, and the presentation of truth for the edification of the public, should hesitate to acknowledge that he was born on a certain date? Well, never mind! Even the greatest men have flaws in their make-up, Richard—and I have mine.”
As they left the restaurant, strolling leisurely toward Broadway, they found the streets less crowded than they had been an hour before.
“It is the time,” said Fenton, “when the city rests for a moment from labor, and pauses to catch its breath before it begins to dissipate—the interlude between its work for earthly taskmasters and its work for Satan.”
“What a cynic you are, Fenton!” exclaimed Richard almost deprecatingly.
“Not at all, my boy. I will tell you what I am some day. I am far from being a cynic; but it makes me sad to think that this whole fabric of society must undergo heroic treatment before any real progress in civilization can be made.”