whether it was published in a Sunday paper or in white vellum, or never published at all.  And so long as he knew he wrote it, he didn’t care whether anyone else knew it or not.  Why, when that English reviewer—­what’s his name—­that friend of Kipling’s—­passed through New York, he said to a lot of us at the Press Club, ’You’ve got a young man here on Park Row—­an opium-eater, I should say, by the look of him, who if he would work and leave whiskey alone, would make us all sweat.’  That’s just what he said, and he’s the best in England!”

“Charlie’s a genius,” growled the baseball reporter, defiantly.  “I say, he’s a genius.”

The Boston man shook his head.  “My boy,” he began, sententiously, “genius is nothing more than hard work, and a man—­”

Norris slapped the table with his hand.

“Oh, no, it’s not,” he jeered, fiercely, “and don’t you go off believing it is, neither.  I’ve worked.  I’ve worked twelve hours a day.  Keating even has worked eighteen hours a day—­all his life—­but we never wrote ‘The Passing of the Highbinders,’ nor the ’Ships that Never Came Home,’ nor ‘Tales of the Tenderloin,’ and we never will.  I’m a better news-gatherer than Charlie, I can collect facts and I can put them together well enough, too, so that if a man starts to read my story he’ll probably follow it to the bottom of the column, and he may turn over the page, too.  But I can’t say the things, because I can’t see the things that Charlie sees.  Why, one night we sent him out on a big railroad-story.  It was a beat, we’d got it by accident, and we had it all to ourselves, but Charlie came across a blind beggar on Broadway with a dead dog.  The dog had been run over, and the blind beggar couldn’t find his way home without him, and was sitting on the curb-stone, weeping over the mongrel.  Well, when Charlie came back to the office he said he couldn’t find out anything about that railroad deal, but that he’d write them a dog-story.  Of course, they were raging crazy, but he sat down just as though it was no concern of his, and, sure enough, he wrote the dog-story.  And the next day over five hundred people stopped in at the office on their way downtown and left dimes and dollars to buy that man a new dog.  Now, hard work won’t do that.”

Keating had been taking breakfast in the ward-room of H. M. S. Indefatigable.  As an acquaintance the officers had not found him an undoubted acquisition, but he was the representative of seven hundred papers, and when the Indefatigable’s ice-machine broke, he had loaned the officers’ mess a hundred pounds of it from his own boat.

The cruiser’s gig carried Keating to the wharf, the crew tossed their oars and the boatswain touched his cap and asked, mechanically, “Shall I return to the ship, sir?”

Channing, stretched on the beach, with his back to a palm-tree, observed the approach of Keating with cheerful approbation.

“It is gratifying to me,” he said, “to see the press treated with such consideration.  You came in just like Cleopatra in her barge.  If the flag had been flying, and you hadn’t steered so badly, I should have thought you were at least an admiral.  How many guns does the British Navy give a Consolidated Press reporter when he comes over the side?”