CONTENTS.

PAGE
The Reporter who made himself King[ 1]
Midsummer Pirates[ 88]
Richard Carr’s Baby[ 117]
The Great Tri-Club Tennis Tournament [ 130]
The Jump at Corey’s Slip[ 166]
The Van Bibber Baseball Club[ 177]
The Story of a Jockey[ 184]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

“I never saw a King,” Gordon remarked,“and I’m sure I never expected to seeone sitting on a log in the rain,”[ Frontispiece]
PAGE
“About time to begin on the goats!”[ 44]
To the North towered three magnificenthulls of the White Squadron,[ 86]
“Which do I think will win?” said theveteran boat-builder of Manasquan,[ 96]
As the two Prescotts scrambled up on thegunwale of their boat, the defeatedcrew saluted them with cheers,[ 112]
He took a large roll of bills from hispocket and counted them,[ 198]

THE REPORTER WHO MADE HIMSELF KING.

The Old Time Journalist will tell you the best reporter is the one who works his way up. He will hold that the only way to start is as a printer’s devil, or as an office boy, to learn in time to set type, to graduate from a compositor into a stenographer, and as a stenographer take down speeches at public meetings, and so finally grow into a real reporter, with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speaking acquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not even excepting Police Captains.

That is the old time journalist’s idea of it. That is the way he was trained, and that is why he is reporting still. If you train up a youth in this way, he will go into reporting with too full a knowledge of the newspaper business, with no illusions concerning it, and with no ignorant enthusiasms, but with a keen and justifiable impression that he is not paid enough for what he does. And he will only do what he is paid to do. Now, you cannot pay a good reporter for what he does, because he does not work for pay. He works for his paper. He gives his time, his health, his brains, his sleeping hours, and his eating hours, and life sometimes, to get news for it. He thinks the sun rises only that men may have light by which to read it. But if he has been in a newspaper office from his youth up, he finds out before he becomes a reporter that this is not so, and loses his real value. He should come right out of the University where he has been doing “campus notes” for the college weekly, and be pitchforked out into city work without knowing whether the Battery is at Harlem or Hunter’s Point, and with the idea that he is a Moulder of Public Opinion and that the Power of the Press is greater than the Power of Money, and that the few lines he writes are of more value in the Editor’s eyes than the column of advertising on the last page, which they are not. After three years—it is sometimes longer, sometimes not so long—he finds out that he has given his nerves and his youth and his enthusiasm in exchange for a general fund of miscellaneous knowledge, the opportunity of personal encounter with all the greatest and most remarkable men and events that have risen in those three years, and a great readiness of resource, and patience. He will find that he has crowded the experiences of the lifetime of the ordinary young business man, doctor, or lawyer, or man about town, into three short years; that he has learnt to think and to act quickly, to be patient and unmoved when every one else has lost his head, actually or figuratively speaking; to write as fast as another man can talk, and to be able to talk with authority on matters of which other men do not venture even to think until they have read what he has written with a copy-boy at his elbow on the night previous.

It is necessary for you to know this, that you may understand what manner of young man young Albert Gordon was.

Young Gordon had been a reporter just three years. He had left Yale when his last living relative died, and taken the morning train for New York, where they had promised him reportorial work on one of the innumerable Greatest New York Dailies. He arrived at the office at noon, and was sent back over the same road on which he had just come, to Spuyten Duyvil, where a train had been wrecked and about everybody of consequence to suburban New York killed. One of the old reporters hurried him to the office again with his “copy,” and after he had delivered that, he was sent to the Tombs to talk French to a man in Murderer’s Row, who could not talk anything else, but who had shown some international skill in the use of a jimmy. And at eight, he covered a flower show in Madison Square Garden; and at eleven was sent over the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab to watch a fire and make guesses at the insurance.

He went to bed at one, and dreamt of shattered locomotives, human beings lying still with blankets over them, rows of cells, and banks of beautiful flowers nodding their heads to the tunes of the brass band in the gallery. He decided when he awoke the next morning that he had entered upon a picturesque and exciting career, and as one day followed another, he became more and more convinced of it, and more and more devoted to it. He was eighteen then, and he was now twenty-one, and in that time had become a great reporter, and had been to Presidential conventions in Chicago, revolutions in Hayti, Indian outbreaks on the Plains, and midnight meetings of moonlighters in Tennessee, and had seen what work earthquakes, floods, fire, and fever could do in great cities, and had contradicted the President, and borrowed matches from burglars. And now he thought he would like to rest and breathe a bit, and not to work again unless as a war correspondent or as a novelist. He had always had enough money of his own to keep him alive, and so he was in consequence independent of what the paper gave him. The only obstacle to his becoming a great war correspondent lay in the fact that there was no war, and a war correspondent without a war is about as absurd an individual as a general without an army. He read the papers every morning on the elevated trains for war clouds; but though there were many war clouds, they always drifted apart, and peace smiled again. This was very disappointing to young Gordon, and he was more and more keenly discouraged.