They tell me it is a fine thing to take a little walk before bed-time.  I go out into the suburban street.  A thin, wet mist hangs over the silent and monotonous houses, and blurs the electric lamps along our road.  There will be a fog in Fleet Street to-night, but everyone is too busy to notice it.  How friendly a fog made us all!  How jolly it was that night when I ran straight into a Chronicle man, and got a lead of him by a short head over the same curse!  There’s no chance of running into anyone here, let alone cursing!  A few figures slouch past and disappear; the last postman goes his round, knocking at one house in ten; up and down the asphalt path leading into the obscurity of the Common a wretched woman wanders in vain; the long, pointed windows of a chapel glimmer with yellowish light through the dingy air, and I hear the faint groans of a harmonium cheering the people dismally home.  The groaning ceases, the lights go out, service is over; it will soon be time for decent people to be in bed.

In Fleet Street the telegrams will now be falling thick as—­No, I won’t say it!  No Vallombrosa for me, nor any other journalistic tag!  I remember once a young sub-editor had got as far as, “The cry is still—­” when I took him by the throat.  I have done the State some service.

Our sub-editors’ room is humming now:  a low murmur of questions, rapid orders, the rustle of paper, the quick alarum of telephones.  Boys keep bringing telegrams in orange envelopes.  Each sub-editor is bent over his little lot of news.  One sorts out the speeches from bundles of flimsy.  The middle of Lloyd George’s speech has got mixed up with Balfour’s peroration.  If he left them mixed, would anyone be the less wise?  Perhaps the speakers might notice it, and that man from Wiltshire would be sure to write saying he had always supported Mr. Balfour, and heartily welcomed this fresh evidence of his consistency.

“Six columns speeches in already; how much?” asks the sub-editor.  “Column and quarter,” comes answer from the head of the table, and the cutting begins.  Another sub-editor pieces together an interview about the approaching comet.  “Keep comet to three sticks,” comes the order, and the comet’s perihelion is abbreviated.  Another guts a blue-book on prison statistics as savagely as though he were disembowelling the whole criminal population.

There’s the telephone ringing.  “Hullo, hullo!” calls a sub-editor quietly.  “Who are you?  Margate mystery?  Go ahead.  They’ve found the corpse?  All right.  Keep it to a column, but send good story.  Horrible mutilations?  Good.  Glimpse the corpse yourself if you can.  Yes.  Send full mutilations.  Will call for them at eleven.  Good-bye.”  “You doing the Archbishop, Mr. Jones?” asks the head of the table.  “Cup-tie at Sunderland,” answers Mr. Jones, and all the time the boys go in and out with those orange-coloured bulletins of the world’s health.