He will find that he has crowded
the experiences of the lifetime of the ordinary young business man,
doctor, or lawyer, or man about town, into three short years; that he
has learned to think and to act quickly, to be patient and unmoved
when every one else has lost his head, actually or figuratively
speaking; to write as fast as another man can talk, and to be able to
talk with authority on matters of which other men do not venture even
to think until they have read what he has written with a copy-boy at
his elbow on the night previous.
It is necessary for you to know this, that you may understand what
manner of man young Albert Gordon was.
Young Gordon had been a reporter just three years. He had left Yale
when his last living relative died, and had taken the morning train
for New York, where they had promised him reportorial work on one of
the innumerable Greatest New York Dailies. He arrived at the office at
noon, and was sent back over the same road on which he had just come,
to Spuyten Duyvil, where a train had been wrecked and everybody of
consequence to suburban New York killed. One of the old reporters
hurried him to the office again with his "copy," and after he had
delivered that, he was sent to the Tombs to talk French to a man in
Murderers' Row, who could not talk anything else, but who had shown
some international skill in the use of a jimmy. And at eight, he
covered a flower-show in Madison Square Garden; and at eleven was sent
over the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab to watch a fire and make guesses at
the losses to the insurance companies.
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