Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/80



ALEXANDER MURDONG retired from the Chicago Fredonia wdth his feelings badly mangled by the sarcasm of a fine-grained city editor, one Lawser. The trouble was, Murdong did not care to waste poetic temperament on the prosaic affairs of Market Street, the Drainage Canal, and weepy, villainous individuals who were haled to the various city police stations on various charges affecting their past and present lack of behaviour.

In other words, City Editor Lawser saw in Murdong's casual contributions to the Sunday edition the instinct and the power of a sob writer, and Murdong hated the idea of turning his sweet soul to the task of singing the sorrows of the wicked and the vile. Accordingly, he departed from the Chicago newspaper world.

Murdong would not admit it, but he was a failure as a Chicago reporter. He thought to himself that Chicago grated on his nerves and he had in mind seeking a different environment in which to permit the poetic muse with which he was endowed—which the city editor had tried to divert to bringing tears to 74