t writer." He gave me one of those
fatherly smiles. "I've got some things to say to _you_, Kid. I don't
like the life you're leading."

"Don't you? Why don't you?" I rejoined. And so began a fight that lasted
as long as he was in Paris.

Nothing that I had been doing here made any appeal whatever to Joe. I
showed him my sketch of Notre Dame from under that old bridge at night.

"Yes," he said, "this is fine writing, awful fine. But it has about as
much meaning to me as a woman's left ear. What's the use of sitting down
under a bridge and looking up at an ancient church and trying to feel
like a two-spot? For God's sake, Bill, get it out of your system, quit
getting reverent over the past. You're sitting here at the feet of the
Masters, fellahs who were all right in their day, but are now every one
of 'em out of date. And you're so infernally busy copying their
technique and style and trying to learn just how to write, that you're
getting nothing to write about. Why can't you go to life for your
stuff?"

"Go to life?" I said indignantly. "I've done nothing else for over a
year!"

"Show me."

"Here!"

He read more of my sketches.

"But damn it, Bill, these people aren't alive. They're only a bunch of
artist kids as reverent over the past as yourself, they have about as
much connection with anything live and vital to-day as so many mediaeval
monks. You fellahs think you're free of creeds. You're the creediest
kids I ever saw, your religion is style, technique and form. For God's
sake lose it and use your own eyes, forget you're an artist and be a
reporter, come out in the world and have a try. You'll find so much
stuff you won't need any plots, you'll simply report events as they
happen. And you won't have any time for technique, the next event will
be tuning up before you've got to the end of the last. With a big daily
paper behind him a good reporter can follow the front page around the
world. Russia's on the front page now. All right, you can go to Russia.
By June it may be Hindustan, or Pittsburgh, Turkey or China. Believe me,
Bill, the nations of this planet are working themselves into a state
where they're ready to do things you never dreamed of. I'm not talking
of kings and governments, I'm talking of the people themselves, the
people in such excited crowds that nobody knows who's who or what's
next.

"I saw my first crowd in Petersburg the very day I got off the train.
They filled a street from wall to