reader, but it does not satisfy the expert. Immediately after my first
bout with interviewers I was seated at a table in the dining-saloon of
the ship with my particular friend and three or four friendly, quiet,
modest, rather diffident human beings whom I afterward discovered to be
among the best and most experienced newspaper men in New York--not
interviewers.

Said one of them:

"Not every interviewer in New York knows how to _write_--how to put a
sentence together decently. And there are perhaps a few who don't
accurately know the difference between impudence and wit."

A caustic remark, perhaps. But I have noticed that when the variety of
interviewing upon which I have just animadverted becomes the topic,
quiet, reasonable Americans are apt to drop into causticity.

Said another:

"I was a reporter for twelve years, but I was cured of personalities at
an early stage--and by a nigger, too! I had been interviewing a nigger
prize-fighter, and I'd made some remarks about the facial
characteristics of niggers in general. Some other nigger wrote me a long
letter of protest, and it ended like this: 'I've never seen you. But
I've seen your portraits, and let me respectfully tell you that _you're_
no Lillian Russell.'"

Some mornings I, too, might have sat down and written, from visual
observation, "Let me respectfully tell you that _you're_ no Lillian
Russell."

Said a third among my companions:

"No importance whatever is attached to a certain kind of interview in
the United States."

Which I found, later, was quite true in theory, but not in practice.
Whenever, in that kind of interview, I had been made to say something
more acutely absurd and maladroit than usual, my friends who watched
over me, and to whom I owe so much that cannot be written, were a little
agitated--for about half an hour; in about half an hour the matter had
somehow passed from their minds.

"Supposing I refuse to talk to that sort of interviewer?" I asked, at
the saloon table.

"The interviews will appear all the same," was the reply.

My subsequent experience contradicted this. On the rare occasions when I
refused to be interviewed, what appeared was not an interview, but
invective.

Let me not be misunderstood. I have been speaking of only one brand of
American interviewer. I encountered a couple of really admirable women
interviewers, not too young, and a confraternity of men who did not
disdain an elementary knowledge of their