where each fraction of a second counts. In the office afterwards, each page transcribed was whipped away by a printer's devil before it could be reconsidered and re-read. I invariably went to bed after these evenings in church with a splitting headache; but the 150 appeared duly on the front page every Monday morning, though whether good or bad I had no inkling. My impression, due to Muldoon's silence, was that my reports were hardly a success.
When the last of the long series came my opening report was confused and inaccurate owing to an announcement from the pulpit which embarrassed me absurdly. Dr. Abbott mentioned briefly that numerous requests to print the sermons had reached him, but that he did not propose to do so. He referred those interested, instead, to the reports in the Times which, he took pleasure in saying, were excellent, accurate and as satisfactory as anything he could do himself. Being the only reporter present, I felt conspicuous at my little table under the pulpit in the immense building. But I remember the pleasure too. It was an announcement I could use, was bound to use, indeed, in my own report next day. Muldoon would be pleased. On the Tuesday morning, when I appeared at his desk, he looked at me with such a fierce expression that I thought I was about to be dismissed. "Have ye been to your locker?" was all he said. In the locker, however, I found a letter from Dr. Abbott to the editor-in-chief, thanking him for the reports of the sermons, reports, he wrote, "whose brevity, accuracy, and intelligence furnish a synopsis I could not have improved upon myself." He added, too, another important sentence: "by your reporter whom I do not know." It was not favouritism therefore. A brief chit to be handed to the cashier was in my locker too. My salary was raised to $40 a week. The headaches had proved worth while.
The year and a-half with the Times was a happy period, though long before it ended I had begun to feel my customary weariness of the job, and a yearning for something
new. The newspaper experience, which began with the
