In the course of time I got down to brass tacks; I took a staff position, a desk job.  It was up to me to review everything going, in a steady ceaseless grind.  I began work at half past nine in the morning.  When I was commuting I began earlier, taking up a book on the train.  Between nine thirty and a quarter to eleven I did a book, say, on the extermination of the house-fly; from then until lunch time, three hundred words on a very pleasant novel called, for instance, “Roast Beef, Medium”; in the afternoon, three-quarters of a column on a “History of the American Negro”; winding up the day, perhaps, with a lively article about a popular book on “Submarine Diving and Light Houses”; and taking home at night the “Note Books of Samuel Butler.”  I began the morrow, very likely, with an “omnibus article” lumping together five books on the Panama Canal.  And then, as the publishers of the latest book on art had turned in a double-column hundred-agate-line “ad” the week before, it was necessary to do something serious “for” that masterpiece.  I reviewed a dictionary and a couple of cookery books.  At the holiday season I polished off a jumble of Christmas and New Year’s cards, a pile of picture calendars, and a table full of “juveniles.”  Woman suffrage, alcoholism, New Thought, socialism, minor poetry, big game hunting, militarism, athletics, architecture, eugenics, industry, European travel, education, eroticism, red blood fiction, humour, uplift books, white slavery, nature study, aviation, bygone kings (and their mistresses), statesmen, scientists, poverty, disease, and crime, I had always with me.  I became a slightly bald reviewer.

Books of theology and of philosophy were given out to a theologian; books concerning the dramatic art were done by the dramatic critic; and those on music went to the music critic.  We had an occasional letter from Paris on current French literature.

In addition to writing (for I was an editor), I read the “literary” galley proofs; “made up” once a week down in the composing room late at night; compiled the feature variously called in different papers Books Received, Books of the Week, or The Newest Books; and got out the correspondence of the literary department—­with publishers and with fools who write in about things.  I also went over the foreign exchange, that is:  clipped literary notes out of foreign papers.  Once a month I surveyed the current magazines.  I worked in the office on every holiday of the year except Christmas and New Year’s, and frequently on Sundays at home.

With a view to attracting the intellectual elite to a profession where this class is needed, I will tell you what I got for this.  It should be understood, however, that I was with one of the great papers, which paid a scale of generous salaries.  Mine was forty dollars a week.  That is a good deal of money for a literary man to earn regularly.  But—­