last was written. And I have kept this up for many hours at a time. I have gone forth after breakfast to see a whole page of the paper given up to my report of such all-day meetings, at which I had worked for fourteen consecutive hours the day before, lunching on bananas and a sandwich and supping on a similar meal. I have had the printer’s “devil” stand at my elbow to seize every fresh sheet that flew out from under my pencil, almost before it was done, the hot presses upstairs crying, with the horse-leech’s daughters, “Give, give.” I have crawled from my bed in the morning only to fall back across it in a dead faint, and then have gotten up and gone out to another regular day’s work. And I have beaten the men on rival papers in “scoops” which occupied columns, and told no lies. But in spite of the fascination in this sort of thing—and it is a wonderful fascination—I could not keep it up. And when, after a few years, there came a chance to edit an obscure monthly at a fair salary, I took it. Then I added a dramatic department for a weekly paper to my regular duties, doing the work evenings. Later I went to the weekly paper as editor of several departments, and still later took on a regular department in the Saturday edition of the most highly respected journal in my city.
Then came a time, covering several years, when I had charge of twenty-eight columns a week, on three papers, all of which I filled on time and without help from “subs.” I was not paid well enough to hire subordinates. I worked eight hours a day in my dark, dingy office, and six more in my “den” at home every night, going to theatres from twice to five times a week, and working all day Sunday to bring up the ends. I have edited news-columns, fashion, health, dramatic, hotel, book-review, railroad, bicycle, fancy-work, kitchen, woman’s club, society, palmistry, and correspondence departments, and withal kept up an editorial-notes column for eight years. And then I started a journal of my own.
“Why did I attempt so much?” The question has been asked repeatedly. Chiefly because I was not paid enough for any one department so that I could afford to do less. A man in my place on the weekly paper would have been paid twice my salary. On the Saturday paper he would have received three or four times what I got. I am not prepared to say that he would have done these things any better than I, but I can safely admit that if I had not done so much I could have given much better “stuff,” to use a technical newspaper term. When I opened my department on the Saturday paper, it covered a new field, one about which the managing editor felt doubtful. He insisted that I sign my name; to this I consented, and my name appeared for three years at the end of my article. Then came a time when my department was fearfully cut, not to say mutilated, every week in the city department. I bore it for a time, and then protested. “I think,” said the managing editor, in reply to my complaint, “the whole trouble comes from your signing your name.” “But I did it because you said I must,” I cried in astonishment. “Yes,” was his answer. “But your department has proved one of the most popular features of the paper. You are getting a great deal of glory out of it, and some of the men upstairs, who do good work but are not allowed to sign it, are jealous. You cannot blame them.” And so to please these men I stopped signing my name, and matters ran smoothly again for several years, until my own paper took so much of my time that I withdrew from others.
I started my own journal because, reasoning from such incidents as I have just narrated, I saw the time coming when I should be calmly dropped from the regular newspaper. Women had become plentiful in journalistic ranks,—women who could do sensational work, whose health was more reliable, and who had the advantage of being young. I saw that in a few years I should be succeeded by the younger generation of newspaper wo-
