a fancy flourish and handed it in. I know all these details of his
story, because it fell to me to rewrite it.

Devore didn't say a word when the old major reverently laid that armload
of copy down in front of him. He just sat and waited in silence until
the major had gone out to get a bite to eat, and then he undertook to
edit it. But there wasn't any way to edit it, except to throw it away. I
suppose that kind of literature went very well indeed back along about
1850; I remember having read such accounts in the back files of old
weeklies, printed before the war. But we were getting out a live, snappy
paper. Devore tried to pattern the local side after the New York and
Chicago models. As yet we hadn't reached the point where we spoke of any
white woman without the prefix Mrs. or Miss before her name, but we were
up-to-date in a good many other particulars. Why, it was even against
the office rule to run "beauty and chivalry" into a story when
describing a mixed assemblage of men and women; and when a Southern
newspaper bars out that ancient and honorable standby among phrases it
is a sign that the old order has changed.

For ten minutes or so Devore, cursing softly to himself, cut and chopped
and gutted his way through the major's introduction, and between
slashing strokes made a war map of the Balkans in his scalp with his
blue pencil. Then he lost patience altogether.

"Here," he said to me, "you're not doing anything, are you? Well, take
this awful bunch of mushy slush and read it through, and then try to
make a decent half-column story out of it. And rush it over a page at a
time, will you? We've got to hustle to catch the three o'clock edition
with it."

Long before three o'clock the major was back in the shop, waiting for
the first run of papers to come off the press. Furtively I watched him
as he hunted through the sticky pages to find his first story. I guess
he had the budding pride of authorship in him, just as all the rest of
us have it in us. But he didn't find his story, he found mine. He didn't
say anything, but he looked crushed and forlorn as he got up and went
away. It was like him not to ask for any explanations, and it was like
Devore not to offer him any.

So it went. Even if he had grown up in the business I doubt whether
Major Putnam Stone would ever have made a newspaper man; and now he was
too far along in life to pick up even the rudiments of the trade. He
didn't have any more idea of new