I would have challenged the publisher in the “blind lead” days—­I wanted to fall down and worship him, now.  Twenty-Five Dollars a week—­it looked like bloated luxury—­a fortune a sinful and lavish waste of money.  But my transports cooled when I thought of my inexperience and consequent unfitness for the position—­and straightway, on top of this, my long array of failures rose up before me.  Yet if I refused this place I must presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a humiliation since he was thirteen years old.  Not much to be proud of, since it is so common—­but then it was all I had to be proud of.  So I was scared into being a city editor.  I would have declined, otherwise.  Necessity is the mother of “taking chances.”  I do not doubt that if, at that time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, I would have accepted—­albeit with diffidence and some misgivings—­and thrown as much variety into it as I could for the money.

I went up to Virginia and entered upon my new vocation.  I was a rusty looking city editor, I am free to confess—­coatless, slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt.  But I secured a more Christian costume and discarded the revolver.

I had never had occasion to kill anybody, nor ever felt a desire to do so, but had worn the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in order that I might not, by its absence, be offensively conspicuous, and a subject of remark.  But the other editors, and all the printers, carried revolvers.  I asked the chief editor and proprietor (Mr. Goodman, I will call him, since it describes him as well as any name could do) for some instructions with regard to my duties, and he told me to go all over town and ask all sorts of people all sorts of questions, make notes of the information gained, and write them out for publication.  And he added: 

“Never say ‘We learn’ so-and-so, or ‘It is reported,’ or ‘It is rumored,’ or ‘We understand’ so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts, and then speak out and say ‘It is so-and-so.’  Otherwise, people will not put confidence in your news.  Unassailable certainly is the thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation.”

It was the whole thing in a nut-shell; and to this day when I find a reporter commencing his article with “We understand,” I gather a suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform himself as he ought to have done.  I moralize well, but I did not always practise well when I was a city editor; I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too often when there was a dearth of news.  I can never forget my first day’s experience as a reporter.  I wandered about town questioning everybody, boring everybody, and finding out that nobody knew anything.  At the end of five hours my notebook was still barren.  I spoke to Mr. Goodman.  He said: