to the stockyards, etc.  My salary came near to paying my board and lodging, but it didn’t quite do it.  But I had a good time in St. Joe for somewhat more than a year.  There were interesting people there.  I came to know something about Western life.  Kansas was across the river.  I often went there.  I came to know Kansas City, St. Louis—­a good deal of the West.  After a while I was made editor of the paper.  What a rousing political campaign or two we had!  Then—­I had done that kind of a job as long as I cared to.  Every swashbuckling campaign is like every other one.  Why do two?  Besides, I knew my trade.  I had done everything on a daily paper from stockyard reports to political editorials and heavy literary articles.  In the meantime I had written several magazine articles and done other such jobs.  I got leave of absence for a month or two.  I wrote to several of the principal papers in Chicago, New York, and Boston and told them that I was going down South to make political and social studies and that I was going to send them my letters.  I hoped they’d publish them.

“That’s all I could say.  I could make no engagement; they didn’t know me.  I didn’t even ask for an engagement.  I told them simply this:  that I’d write letters and send them; and I prayed heaven that they’d print them and pay for them.  Then off I went with my little money in my pocket—­about enough to get to New Orleans.  I travelled and I wrote.  I went all over the South.  I sent letters and letters and letters.  All the papers published all that I sent them and I was rolling in wealth!  I had money in my pocket for the first time in my life.  Then I went back to St. Joe and resigned; for the (old) New York World had asked me to go to the Atlanta Exposition as a correspondent.  I went.  I wrote and kept writing.  How kind Henry Grady was to me!  But at last the Exposition ended.  I was out of a job.  I applied to the Constitution.  No, they wouldn’t have me.  I never got a job in my life that I asked for!  But all my life better jobs have been given me than I dared ask for.  Well—­I was at the end of my rope in Atlanta and I was trying to make a living in any honest way I could when one day a telegram came from the New York World (it was the old World, which was one of the best of the dailies in its literary quality) asking me to come to New York.  I had never seen a man on the paper—­had never been in New York except for a day when I landed there on a return voyage from a European trip that I took during one vacation when I was in the University.  Then I went to New York straight and quickly.  I had an interesting experience on the old World, writing literary matter chiefly, an editorial now and then, and I was frequently sent as a correspondent on interesting errands.  I travelled all over the country with the Tariff Commission.  I spent one winter in Washington as a sort of editorial correspondent while the tariff bill was going through Congress.  Then, one day, the World was sold to Mr. Pulitzer and all the staff resigned.  The character of the paper changed.”