g came a kid with
a bunch of papers wet from the presses and sticks one in his hand,
and--well, girl, that fellow, he just wriggled he was so happy. You know
as well as I do that every man on a morning paper spends his day off
hanging around the office wishin' that a mob or a fire or somethin' big
would tear lose so he could get back into the game. I guess I told you
about the time Von Gerhard sent me abroad, didn't I?"

"Von Gerhard!" I repeated, startled. "Do you know him?"

"Well, he ain't braggin' about it none," Blackie admitted. "Von Gerhard,
he told me I had about five years or so t' live, about two, three years
ago. He don't approve of me. Pried into my private life, old Von Gerhard
did, somethin' scand'lous. I had sort of went to pieces about that time,
and I went t' him to be patched up. He thumps me fore 'an' aft, firing
a volley of questions, lookin' up the roof of m' mouth, and squintin'
at m' finger nails an' teeth like I was a prize horse for sale. Then he
sits still, lookin' at me for about half a minute, till I begin t' feel
uncomfortable. Then he says, slow: 'Young man, how old are you?'

"'O, twenty-eight or so,' I says, airy.

"'My Gawd!' said he. 'You've crammed twice those years into your life,
and you'll have to pay for it. Now you listen t' me. You got t' quit
workin', an' smokin', and get away from this. Take a ocean voyage,' he
says, 'an' try to get four hours sleep a night, anyway.'

"Well say, mother she was scared green. So I tucked her under m' arm,
and we hit it up across the ocean. Went t' Germany, knowin' that it
would feel homelike there, an' we took in all the swell baden, and
chased up the Jungfrau--sa-a-ay, that's a classy little mountain, that
Jungfrau. Mother, she had some swell time I guess. She never set down
except for meals, and she wrote picture postals like mad. But sa-a-ay,
girl, was I lonesome! Maybe that trip done me good. Anyway, I'm livin'
yet. I stuck it out for four months, an' that ain't so rotten for a guy
who just grew up on printer's ink ever since he was old enough to hold
a bunch of papers under his arm. Well, one day mother an' me was sittin'
out on one of them veranda cafes they run to over there, w'en somebody
hits me a crack on the shoulder, an' there stands old Ryan who used
t' do A. P. here. He was foreign correspondent for some big New York
syndicate papers over there.

"'Well if it ain't Blackie!' he says. 'What in Sam Hill are you doing
out of your