Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/257

 friend's dinner-table, but he did not realize why he had not stopped to think of that.

It was because he was thinking so hard of the other thing. That shows the tendency of these acquired senses.

When, however, facts were seen by the reporter from the point of view of the reported, he could be as human, or as inhumane, as any other busy, ambitious young man. His experience, a year or two later, with the "white-mustached-high-living-lawyer" will show it.

Now Billy Woods by this time had learned something about everything in the big strenuous city, from Harlem to the Battery, and beyond and below. Perhaps he knew more than any youth of his age in it about the manifold interests of a metropolis and its various inhabitants; their personal characteristics and their office hours, their social positions and their business worth, their Christian beliefs and their heathen practices. That is the reason that nearly everybody he ran across fell into categories in the young man's mind. Whenever he found a new type it was a refreshing sur-