serious financial embarrassment. To cite profitable trips too early is to get ahead of my story, but the time is none the less propitious to remark that a country town or a small city certainly is as good a place for the free lance to operate (once he knows a "story" when he sees it) as is New York or Chicago, Boston, New Orleans or San Francisco. I often wonder if I would not have been better off financially if I had kept on working from a Kansas City headquarters instead of emigrating to the East.

I might have gone on this way for a long time, in contentment, for my profits were steadily mounting and my markets extending. But one day my wanderings extended as far as Chicago, and there I ran across an old friend of student days. He had been the cartoonist of the college magazine when I was its editor. He wore,

drooping from one corner of his face, a rah-rah bulldog pipe; an enormous portfolio full of enormities of drawing was under one arm, and, dangling at the end of the other, was one of the tiniest satchels that ever concealed a nightgown.

In answer to questions about what he was doing with himself, he confessed that he was not making out any better than most other newly graduated students of art. I argued that if Chicago did not treat him considerately, he ought

to head for New York, where real genius, more than likely, would be more quickly appreciated. Also, if this was to his liking, I would invite myself to go along with him.

We went. Now sing, O Muse, the slaughter!

CHAPTER VI

IN NEW YORK'S "FLEET STREET"

HE inexperienced free lance who attempts

TH

to invade New York, as we did, with no magazine reputation and no friends at court among the experts of the periodical market, may be assured that he will receive a surprising amount of courtesy. But this courtesy is likely to be administered to help soften the blows of a series of disappointments. Anybody but a genius or one of fortune's darlings may expect that New York, which has a deep and natural distrust of strangers, will require that the newcomer earn his bread in blood-sweat until he has established a reputation for producing the goods. Dear old simple-hearted Father Knickerbocker has been gold-bricked so often that a breezy, friendly manner puts him immediately on his guard.

Most of the editors with whom you will have to deal are home folks, like yourself, from Oskaloosa and Richmond and Santa Barbara and Quincy. Few are native-born New Yorkers,

and scarcely any of them go around with their noses in the air in an "upstage Eastern manner." Most of them are graduates of the newspaper school, and remnants of newspaper cynicism occasionally appear in their outspoken philosophy. But be not deceived by this, for even in the newspaper office the half-baked cub who is getting his first glimpses of woman's frailties and man's weak will is the only cynic who means all he says. All reporters who are worth their salt mellow with the years; and editors who amount to much usually are ex-reporters trained to their jobs by long experience. The biggest editors and the ones with the biggest hearts have the biggest jobs. Most of the snubs you will receive will come from little men in little jobs, trying to impress you with a "front." The biggest editors of the lot are plain home folks whom you would not hesitate to invite to a dinner in a farmhouse kitchen,

What you ought to know when you invade New York without much capital and no reputation to speak of is that you are making a great mistake to move there so early, and that most of the editors to whom you address yourself know you are making a mistake but are too softhearted to tell you so.

Like most other over-optimistic free lances, we invaded New York with an expeditionary

force which was in a woeful state of unprepared

ness.

In a street of brownstone fronts in mid-town Manhattan, a hurdy-gurdy strummed a welcome to us in the golden November sunlight, and a canary in a gilt cage twittered ecstatically from an open window. This moment is worthy of mention because it was the happiest that was granted to us for a number of months thereafter. We rented a small furnished room, top floor rear, and went out for a stroll on Broadway, looking the city over with the appraising eyes of conquerors. We were joyously confident.

One reason why we thought we would do well here was that the latter months of the period preceding our supposedly triumphal entry had seen me arrive at the point of earning almost as much money at free lancing as I could have made as a reporter. Meantime, I had thrilled to see my name affixed to contributions in Collier's, Leslie's, Outlook and Outing, not to mention a few lesser magazines. I thought I knew a "story" when I saw one. I knew how to take photographs and prepare a manuscript for marketing, and New York newspapers and magazines had been treating me handsomely. What we did not realize was that while the New York markets were hospitable enough to western material, they required no further assistance in re