ibility so vividly
personified before him, a spirit of headlong wrath and revenge, and he
came fervently to a realization and a resolve. He saw himself as part of
a close-knit whole; he visioned, sharply, the Institution, complex,
delicate, almost infinitely powerful for good or evil, not alone to
those who composed it, but to the community to which it bore so subtle a
relationship. And he resolved, with a determination that partook of the
nature of prayer and yet was more than prayer, to give himself loyally,
unsparingly, devotedly to the common task. In this spirit he rose, at
the close of the luncheon, to speak.

No newspaper reported the maiden speech of Mr. Harrington Surtaine to
the staff of the Worthington "Clarion." Newspapers are reticent about
their own affairs. In this case it is rather a pity, for the effort is
said to have been an eminently successful one. Estimated by its effect,
it certainly was, for it materialized with quite spiritistic suddenness,
from out the murk of uncertainty and suspicion, the form and substance
of a new _esprit de corps_, among the "Clarion" men, and established the
system of Talk-it-Over Breakfasts which made a close-knit, jealously
guarded corporation and club out of the staff. Free of all ostentation
or self-assertiveness was Hal's talk; simple, and, above all virtues,
brief. He didn't tell his employees what he expected of them. He told
them what they might expect of him. The frankness of his manner, the
self-respecting modesty of his attitude toward an audience of more
experienced subordinates, his shining faith and belief in the profession
which he had adopted; all this eked out by his ease of address and his
dominant physical charm, won them from the first. Only at the close did
he venture upon an assertion of his own ideas or theories.

"It is the Sydney 'Bulletin,' I think, which preserves as its motto the
proposition that every man has at least one good story in him. I have
been studying newspaper files since I took this job,--all the files of
all the papers I could get,--and I'm almost ready to believe that much
news which the papers publish has got realer facts up its sleeve: that
the news is only the shadow of the facts. I'd like to get at the Why of
the day's news. Do you remember Sherlock Holmes's 'commonplace' divorce
suit, where the real cause was that the husband used to remove his front
teeth and hurl 'em at the wife whenever her breakfast-table conversation
w