Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/207

 else, and his picture was printed, four-columns wide, in the newspaper on whose staff he was now one of the least important re porters, where he had to say Sir to the man who had respectfully sought the favor of an interview with him on the day the championship was won, and who now riddled and ridiculed his copy and seemed not to appreciate the significance of a gold foot-ball worn on the watch-chain.

Instead of letting his hair grow long and travelling around the country in a special car to play beautiful foot-ball, he had to stay still most of the day in a remote corner of the dreary edge of the city and look at dead bodies. These were brought to a low, ugly building in a black wagon, which unloaded quickly and then trotted off up Twenty-sixth Street, past the gray gates of Bellevue Hospital, after more.

When they first gave him the Morgue and Coroner's Office—they told him it was an advance to have a regular department—he used to stand inside the receiving room and watch. But even his interest in dead bodies had died now that they had become part of