Something of my old ambition
stirred within me. It did not occur to me that city editors were
not usually obtained by advertising, still less that I was not
competent, having only the vaguest notions of what the functions
of a city editor might be. I applied for the job, and got it at
once. Eight dollars a week was to be my salary; my job, to fill
the local column and attend to the affairs of Hunter's Point and
Blissville generally, politics excluded. The editor attended to
that. In twenty-four hours I was hard at work writing up my then
most ill-favored bailiwick. It is none too fine yet, but in those
days, when every nuisance crowded out of New York found refuge
there, it stunk to heaven.
Certainly I had entered journalism by the back door, very far back
at that, when I joined the staff of the _Review_. Signs of that
appeared speedily, and multiplied day by day. On the third day of
my employment I beheld the editor-in-chief being thrashed down the
street by an irate coachman whom he had offended, and when, in a
spirit of loyalty, I would have cast in my lot with him, I was held
back by one of the printers with the laughing comment that that
was his daily diet and that it was good for him.
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