ill
only do what he is paid to do.

Now, you cannot pay a good reporter for what he does, because he does
not work for pay. He works for his paper. He gives his time, his health,
his brains, his sleeping hours, and his eating hours, and sometimes his
life to get news for it. He thinks the sun rises only that men may have
light by which to read it. But if he has been in a newspaper office from
his youth up, he finds out before he becomes a reporter that this is not
so, and loses his real value. He should come right out of the University
where he has been doing "campus notes" for the college weekly, and be
pitchforked out into city work without knowing whether the Battery is at
Harlem or Hunter's Point, and with the idea that he is a Moulder of
Public Opinion and that the Power of the Press is greater than the Power
of Money, and that the few lines he writes are of more value in the
Editor's eyes than is the column of advertising on the last page, which
they are not. After three years--it is sometimes longer, sometimes not
so long--he finds out that he has given his nerves and his youth and his
enthusiasm in exchange for a general fund of miscellaneous knowledge,
the opportunity of personal encounter with all the greatest and most
remarkable men and events that have risen in those three years, and a
great fund of resource and patience. He will find that he has crowded
the experiences of the lifetime of the ordinary young business man,
doctor, or lawyer, or man about town, into three short years; that he
has learned to think and to act quickly, to be patient and unmoved when
every one else has lost his head, actually or figuratively speaking; to
write as fast as another man can talk, and to be able to talk with
authority on matters of which other men do not venture even to think
until they have read what he has written with a copy-boy at his elbow on
the night previous.

It is necessary for you to know this, that you may understand what
manner of man young Albert Gordon was.

Young Gordon had been a reporter just three years. He had left Yale when
his last living relative died, and had taken the morning train for New
York, where they had promised him reportorial work on one of the
innumerable Greatest New York Dailies. He arrived at the office at
noon, and was sent back over the same road on which he had just come, to
Spuyten Duyvil, where a train had been wrecked and everybody of
consequence to suburban New York killed