For at least a week, during the idlest hours of the morning and evening, I would slip out and get a little something to eat or loiter in an old but little-frequented book-store in Walnut Street, hoping to keep myself out of sight and out of mind. In a spirit of intense depression I picked up a few old books, deciding to read more, to make myself more fit for life. I also decided to leave St. Louis, since no one would have me here, and began to think of Chicago, whether I could stand it to return there, or whether I had better drift on to a strange place. But how should I live or travel, since I had very little money—having wasted it, as I now thought, on riotous living! The unhappy end of a spendthrift! Finally, after mooning about for a day or two more I concluded that I should have to leave my fine room and try to earn some money here so as to be able to leave. And so one morning, without venturing near the _Globe_ and giving the principal meeting-places of reporters and friends a wide berth, I went into the office of the St. Louis _Republic_, then thriving fairly well in an old building at Third and Chestnut streets. Here with a heavy heart, I awaited the coming of the city editor, H. B. Wandell, of whom I had heard a great deal but whom I had never seen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXXIV THE _Republic_ was in a tumbledown old building in a fairly deserted neighborhood in that region near the waterfront from which the city proper had been steadily growing away for years. This paper, if I am not mistaken, was founded in 1808.