at The Ledger office was in some sort
an institution.

None of his new acquaintances volunteered information as to the
mechanism of his new job. Apparently he was expected to figure that out
for himself. By nature reticent, and trained in an environment which
still retained enough of frontier etiquette to make a scrupulous
incuriosity the touchstone of good manners and perhaps the essence of
self-preservation, Banneker asked no questions. He sat and waited.

One by one the other reporters were summoned by name to the city desk,
and dispatched with a few brief words upon the various items of the
news. Presently Banneker found himself alone, in the long files of
desks. For an hour he sat there and for a second hour. It seemed a
curious way in which to be earning fifteen dollars a week. He wondered
whether he was expected to sit tight at his desk. Or had he the freedom
of the office? Characteristically choosing the more active assumption,
he found his way to the current newspaper files. They were like old
friends.

"Mr. Banneker." An office boy was at his elbow. "Mr. Greenough wants
you."

Conscious of a quickened pulse, and annoyed at himself because of it,
the tyro advanced to receive his maiden assignment. The epochal event
was embodied in the form of a small clipping from an evening paper,
stating that a six-year-old boy had been fatally burned at a bonfire
near the North River. Banneker, Mr. Greenough instructed him mildly, was
to make inquiries of the police, of the boy's family, of the hospital,
and of such witnesses as he could find.

Quick with interest he caught up his hat and hurried out. Death, in the
sparsely populated country wherefrom he hailed, was a matter of
inclusive local importance; he assumed the same of New York. Three
intense hours he devoted to an item which any police reporter of six
months' standing would have rounded up in a brace of formal inquiries,
and hastened back, brimful of details for Mr. Greenough.

"Good! Good!" interpolated that blandly approving gentleman from time to
time in the course of the narrative. "Write it, Mr. Banneker! write it."

"How much shall I write?"

"Just what is necessary to tell the news."

Behind the amiable smile which broadened without lighting up the
sub-Mongol physiognomy of the city editor, Banneker suspected something.
As he sat writing page after page, conscientiously setting forth every
germane fact, the recollection of that speculative, estima