Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/88

 It was so much better than dreamily drinking beer in Germany and telling himself that he was a sociologist. It had been a pleasant, contemplative existence for awhile, and he had heard some interesting theories, but he had been doing the student thing too long; and so when he came back to his own country for a vacation he did not keep up the feeling of kindly patronage toward the United States he had felt coming up the bay. The good American yearning to go and do for himself had come upon him. He decided that he was sick of the ease and inexactness of the scholar—sick, too, of having some one else pay his bills, sick of leisurely reading theories about man as a unit. He wanted to see something of men as warm human beings, with their passions and pursuits, their motives and their ways of looking at things. He could not have chosen a better field for it.

"Here, Mr. Linton," the city editor would say, "this man died this afternoon. See if it's true that he drank himself to death. Run up and have a talk with the family."

"Yes, sir," Linton would reply, and then shudder at the thought of how nasty the