Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/202

 all hours of the night, eating from his pocket, and sleeping only when he was off shift, he had enjoyed the life of a street Arab, gloating over his adventures and taking his pay home to his mother, without counting it, as contemptuous as a young genius for the wages of his art.

But he had also to make out daily reports of his hours on duty, the items of his expenses, and those incidents of his day’s work that concerned the case on which he was engaged. And no school-room compositions could have been more tedious. At first he had been allowed to narrate his report to a stenographer, who put it into shape and typed it for him; later, he was required to write it out, for the stenographer to correct and typewrite; but now he had to type it himself, and retype it when the stenographer had revised his spelling and his punctuation, and then type it again if the office manager edited it—which he invariably did.

No cub reporter was ever more harassed.