The Old Reporter
humorous situation at all. He always wanted to explain that there were two kinds, reporters and society reporters, that the latter were no more typical of the vigorous writers who took pride in their work of supplying over three-fourths of all that was read in Christendom, than those meek little lawyers across the room there, whom he frequently saw scudding in and out the court-house with papers in their hands, were the representative lights of the New York bar. And he wanted to explain that any how he had already had a chance to be a copy-editor, and that he had refused because he could not sit still at a desk for hours and read and tinker with other men's stuff and get impatient and nervous. Perhaps it was because he was an artist and must create "stuff" of his own, and would have done so even if he had kept out of newspaper work—a different sort of stuff, Southern verse, possibly, and then he would have won a different sort of fame.
But he became tired of explaining all this, before he became tired of wanting to explain it; while down in the other world
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