“Well, it sha’n’t get tired waiting for me,” exclaimed Myles; “but, Kate, what is your opinion of reporters?”
“I never knew much about any except one reporter,” was the smiling reply; “but if they all turn out as well as he did I should think it was the most splendid business a young man could go into.”
“Who was that?” asked Mrs. Manning and Myles together.
“Charles Dickens,” answered the Vassar girl, “who is said to have collected most of the material he afterward used so wonderfully while he was only a reporter.”
“Good for you, Kate!” shouted Myles. “I always said you were a brick; but now I know that you are a gold brick, and solid right through. Let’s go to supper.”
After supper Myles sat down to convince his family that reporters were a generally misunderstood and unappreciated race, and that, having the opportunity to become one, he would have been worse than foolish had he thrown it away. He repeated all of Van Cleef’s arguments, and added to them the small items of personal experience that he had already gained. In short, he was so enthusiastic, and waxed so eloquent over his theme, that he succeeded in completely reversing the opinions formerly held by his parents. As for Kate, she needed no convincing, and long before he finished she exclaimed:
“If I were not a girl I believe I would rather be a literary man than any thing else in the world, except an artist, and I’d begin by being a reporter too.”
Mrs. Manning was most pleased by what Myles told her about the newspapers making of their reporters agents for the distribution of charity to the people in distress whom they discovered and wrote about.
Mr. Manning said: