in sometime
after six weeks or so and meanwhile I'll let you know if anything turns
up. Yes, I can remember your address. Don't slam the door as you go out.
Most people seem to have been born in a barn.'

"Besides," he continued to himself, fiercely, "what is there in it?
They'll take your youth, all your strength and energy, and give you a
measly living in exchange. They'll fill you with excitement till you're
never good for anything else, any more than a cavalry horse is fitted to
pull a vegetable wagon. Then, when you're old, they've got no use for
you!"

Before his mental vision, in pitiful array, came that unhappy procession
of hacks that files, day in and day out, along Newspaper Row, drawn by
every instinct to the arena that holds nothing for them but a meagre,
uncertain pittance, dwindling slowly to charity.

"That's where I'd be at the last of it," muttered Harlan, savagely, "with
even the cubs offering me the price of a drink to get out. And
Dorothy--good God! Where would Dorothy be?"

He clenched his fists and marched up and down the room in utter despair.
"Why," he breathed, "why wasn't I taught to do something honest, instead
of being cursed with this itch to write? A carpenter, a bricklayer, a
stone-mason,--any one of 'em has a better chance than I!"

And yet, even then, Harlan saw clearly that save where some vast cathedral
reared its unnumbered spires, the mason and the bricklayer were without
significance; that even the builders were remembered only because of the
great uses to which their buildings were put. "That, too, through print,"
he murmured. "It all comes down to the printed page at last."

On a table, near by, was a sheaf of rough copy paper, and six or eight
carefully sharpened pencils--the dull, meaningless stone waiting for the
flint that should strike it into flame. Day after day the table had stood
by the window, without result, save in Harlan's uneasy conscience.

"I'm only a tramp," he said, aloud, "and I've known it, all along."

He sat down by the table and took up a pencil, but no words came.
Remorsefully, he wrote to an acquaintance--a man who had a book published
every year and filled in the intervening time with magazine work and
newspaper specials. He sealed the letter and addressed it idly, then
tossed it aside purposelessly.

"Loafer!" The memory of it stung him like a lash, and, completely
overwhelmed with shame, he hid his face in his hands.

Suddenly, a pair of sof