Kaiser & Co.
told the story in some recently published reminiscences of his own early years.
A most interesting bit of newspaper history could be written about these men, and about the all-pervasive genus of tramp-printer which infested the land at the same epoch. Rarely was the country newspaper office without one or two tramp printers, drooping their pendulous noses above the cases as they threw in the type which the foreman had permitted to accumulate against their arrival. There was always some work for them to do; but the linotype killed the tramp printer, just as the realization that drink and genius do not necessarily go together gradually killed off these vagrant knights of the pencil.
It was a journalist of this sort that Rose became, wandering up and down across America for more than twenty years, never staying long in any place. Only a vague record of this period has survived. For a couple of years he edited three papers in what was then Washington Territory, and for eight months he was a reporter in Victoria, B. C. He drifted down to San Francisco, the natural haven of the derelict, and found the town so attractive that he remained four years, most of the time as sporting editor of one of the papers. His thorough and unusual education must have stood him in
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