Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/87

 to be able to write good enough reports of things for a newspaper. Any one could do that, he thought.

It was a perfectly natural mistake; others have made it. No one with or without two academic degrees and no experience could write reports of things good enough for a newspaper to publish. Not even William Shakespeare would know what to get or how to put it without some training at reporting. To be sure he might get better things and put them in immortal English, but his copy would not "get by the desk." For this thing reporting is a business involving consider able specialized knowledge, to be learned by experiments and mistakes, like every other job, and there's considerable toil and moil and drudgery at the bottom, just as there is at the bottom of any other business or pursuit. So young Linton was bossed around and jumped upon and made to feel very small and stupid and in the way, just as he would have been in a law office, or a mercantile house, or at the bottom of any other place. But he wanted to be bossed and banged around. That was one of the reasons why he had gone into this work.