problems, to find a job for their friend from Harrisburg, or to
tell them how to find a publisher for their poems. Unhappily, their
victim being merely human, is likely to grow a bit snappish under
infliction. Yet now and then he gets a glimpse into a human vexation so
sincere, so honest, and so moving that he turns away from the typewriter
with a sigh. He wonders how one dare approach the chronicling of this
muddled panorama with anything but humility and despair. Frank Harris
once said of Oscar Wilde: "If England insists on treating her criminals
like this, she doesn't deserve to have any." Similarly, if the public
insists on bringing its woes to its colyumists, it doesn't deserve to
have any colyumists. Then the battered jester turns again to his machine
and ticks off something like this:

_We have heard of ladies who have been tempted beyond their
strength. We have also seen some who have been strengthened
beyond their temptation._

Of course there are good days, too. (This is not one of them.) Days when
the whole course of the news seems planned for the benefit of the
chaffish and irreverent commentator. When Governor Hobby of Texas issues
a call for the state cavalry. When one of your clients drops in, in the
goodness of his heart, to give you his own definition of a pessimist--a
pessimist, he says, is a man who wears both belt and suspenders. When a
big jewellery firm in the city puts out a large ad--

Bailey, Banks & Biddle Company
Watches for Women
Of Superior Design and Perfection
of Movement

all that one needs to do to that is to write over it the caption

SO DO WE ALL

and pass on to the next paragraph.

The more a colyumist is out on the streets, making himself the reporter
of the moods and oddities of men, the better his stuff will be. It seems
to me that his job ought to be good training for a novelist, as it
teaches him a habit of human sensitiveness. He becomes filled with an
extraordinary curiosity about the motives and purposes of the people he
sees. The other afternoon I was very much struck by the unconscious
pathos of a little, gentle-eyed old man who was standing on Chestnut
Street studying a pocket notebook. His umbrella leaned against a
shop-window, on the sill of which he had laid a carefully rolled-up
newspaper. By his feet was a neat leather brief-case, plumply filled
with contents not discernible. There he stood (a sort of unsuccessfu