Famous Single Poems
to his own name. Thereafter he was known as A. M. R. Gordon, but it would have required a master mind indeed to identify the wandering newspaperman of that name with Alexander Macgregor Rose, erstwhile minister of the Free Kirk of Evie and Randall!
It was for America that Rose sailed when he turned his back on Scotland. He reached these shores in June, 1879, and at once began the series of wanderings which was to last until his death. He found a natural haven in newspaper work, which was not then the extremely serious profession it has since become. Newspapermen were rather expected to be eccentric and bohemian, and many of them, especially in the smaller cities, drank to excess. The history of American journalism in those days is filled with escapades which would not be tolerated now, any more than a drunkard, however gifted, would be tolerated on the staff.
Moreover there were hundreds and hundreds of such men who had no fixed abode, but wandered from place to place as fancy moved, holding a job as long as they liked it, or until they were fired, and then moving on to hunt for another one. Usually they had no difficulty in finding it, for the paper across the street or at least in the next town had almost certainly just lost a man in the same way. Walt Mason has
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