of journalism. That I had got no further than a step from the bottom, and upon that had none too secure a foothold, I was reminded when the second book for review lay open before me.
The other venture was Our Continent, also a weekly, but illustrated, edited by Judge Tourgee. Of my contributions, I remember chiefly an article on Shop Windows, which suggests that I was busy with what I might call a more pretentious kind of reporting. My subjects and my manner of treating them may have been what they were,—of no special value to anybody but myself. But to myself I cannot exaggerate their value. I was learning from them all the time.
It was an education just to learn what a newspaper was. Heretofore I had accepted it as a thing that came of itself, arriving in the morning with the milk and the rolls for breakfast. I knew as little of its origin as the town boy knew of where the milk comes from in the Punch story that I do not doubt was old when Punch was young. Milk he had always seen poured from a can, our newspaper we had always had from the nearest news-agent. It was very simple. A newspaper appeared on the breakfast-table of a well-regulated Philadelphia house just as the water ran when the tap was turned on in the bath-room, or the gas burned when lit by a match. But after one article, after one visit to a newspaper office, after one journey to Atlantic City or New York, the newspaper did not seem so simple. I began to understand that it would not have
