Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/248

 Then Stone looked distrait, and so the copy-readers poised pencils to listen; but, as if changing his mind, Stone asked, "What else did the professor say?" And now the office had its first exhibition of Woods's wondrous, sponge - like memory. … "Anything else? … Thank you. Go home to bed."

The next morning young Woods, whose sense of humor was as embryonic as his sense of news, had to read it twice before the thing took hold of him; then he saw some of the beauty of the story which Stone had written.

It was not sarcastic. It was a calm, dispassionate account, apparently, with many quotations from the little professor's paper, and no comment at all, leaving all that to the reader—the orthodox, the artistic "aloofness" attitude, for lacking which the young professor in his class-room was wont to patronize, heartlessly, a man by the name of Thackeray.

It taught young Billy volumes about news—as Stone meant it to. Also it set Billy to thinking about the great opportunity of