verity.  Why not?  Simply with the aid of pen and ink he transferred from the cells of his memory into actual phrases the silent panorama which he had seen with his own eyes.  That one matchless hour before the dawn was entirely his.  Throughout its sixty minutes he had watched and waited with every sense quivering.  He had watched and heard that first breath of dawn come stealing into life.  It was child’s play to him.  He knew nothing about editors, but he walked into the office of the newspaper which he had picked up, and explained his mission.

“We are not looking for new contributors at present,” he was told a little curtly.  “What paper have you been on?”

“I have never written anything before in my life,” Burton confessed, “but this is much better than ‘London Awake,’ which you published a few evenings ago.”

The sub-editor of that newspaper looked at him with kindly contempt.

“‘London Awake’ was written for us by Rupert Mendosa.  We don’t get beginner’s stuff like that.  I don’t think it will be the least use, but I’ll look at your article if you like—­quick!”

Burton handed over his copy with calm confidence.  It was shockingly written on odd pieces of paper, pinned together anyhow—­an untidy and extraordinary-looking production.  The sub-editor very nearly threw it contemptuously back.  Instead he glanced at it, frowned, read a little more, and went on reading.  When he had finished, he looked at this strange, thin young man with the pallid cheeks and deep-set eyes, in something like awe.

“You wrote this yourself?” he asked.

“Certainly, sir,” Burton answered.  “If it is really worth putting in your paper and paying for, you can have plenty more.”

“But why did you write it?” the editor persisted.  “Where did you get the idea from?”

Burton looked at him in mild-eyed wonder.

“It is just what I see as I pass along,” he explained.

The sub-editor was an ambitious literary man himself and he looked steadfastly away from his visitor, out of the window, his eyes full of regret, his teeth clenched almost in anger.  Just what he saw as he passed along!  What he saw—­this common-looking, half-educated little person, with only the burning eyes and sensitive mouth to redeem him from utter insignificance!  Truly this was a strange finger which opened the eyes of some and kept sealed the eyelids of others!  For fifteen years this very cultivated gentleman who sat in the sub-editor’s chair and drew his two thousand a year, had driven his pen along the scholarly way, and all that he had written, beside this untidy-looking document, had not in it a single germ of the things that count.

“Well?” Burton asked, with ill-concealed eagerness.

The sub-editor was, after all, a man.  He set his teeth and came back to the present.

“My readers will, I am sure, find your little article quite interesting,” he said calmly.  “We shall be glad to accept it, and anything else you may send us in the same vein.  You have an extraordinary gift for description.”