ever come near me since, and I have
changed my opinion of her: a beguiling minx, with little taste or
judgment, and more than her share of feminine lightness and caprice; an
unconscionable flirt, that is all she is.

I came to New York, and peeped into the doors of the _Tribune_, the
_World_, the _Times_, and the _Sun_ with all the reverence that a
Moslem may feel when he beholds Mecca. ...

It was in the August of a bounteous year of fruit. The smell of
peaches and grapes piled in barrows and barrels scented the air, as it
scents the memory still. The odour of a peach brings back to me all
the magic-lantern impressions of a stranger--memories of dazzling,
dancing, tropical light, bustle, babble, and gayety; they made me feel
that I had never been alive before, and the people of the old seaport,
active as I had thought them, became in a bewildered retrospect as slow
and quiet as snails. But far sweeter to me than the fragrance of
peaches were the humid whiffs I breathed from the noisy press rooms in
the Park Row basements, the smell of the printers' ink as it was
received by the warm, moist rolls of paper in the whirring, clattering
presses. There was history in the making, destiny at her loom.
Nothing ever expels it: if once a taste for it is acquired, it ties
itself up with ineffaceable memories and longings, and even in
retirement and changed scenes restores the eagerness and aspirations of
the long-passed hour when it first came over us with a sort of
intoxication.

I had no introduction and no experience and was prudent enough to
foresee the rebuff that would surely follow a climb up the dusky but
alluring editorial stairs and an application for employment in so
exalted a profession by a boy of seventeen. I decided that I could use
more persuasion and gain a point in hiding my youth, which was a menace
to me, by writing letters, and so I plunged through the post on Horace
Greeley, on L. J. Jennings, the brilliant, forgotten Englishman who
then edited the _Times_, on Mr. Dana, and on the rest. The astonishing
thing of that time, as I look back on it, was my invulnerability to
disappointments; I expected them and was prepared for them, and when
they came they were as spurs and not as arrows nor as any deadly
weapon. They hardly caused a sigh except a sigh of relief from the
chafing uncertainties of waiting, and instead of depressing they
compelled advances in fresh directions which soon became exhilarating