Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/239

 town and through the country and over the globe, gathering the history of to-day (while you are absorbed by your own more or less important part in it), printing it to-night while you sleep, and handing it to you, for a ridiculous price, fresh and inky-smelling, as soon as you awake in the morning. More varieties of mankind perhaps than in any of the other arts of peace, and they come from more parts of the world apd more strata of society.

Besides those who grow up in the life, from office-boys (through the press- or composing-room, or both, to become, very likely, good, old-fashioned "all-round newspaper men"), and besides those who come with more book-education to seek literary careers in the metropolis, there are older men, who, having made a failure of something else, are "engaged in newspaper-work temporarily," as they continue to say (unless they fail here, too), because it pays so much better than clerkships; and there are younger men, drawn into the life chiefly by the spirit of adventure, which a few generations ago would have taken them to sea, being sick-