And now this national ferment in regard to political preferment and advancement, the swelling tides of wealth and population in Chicago, the upward soaring of names and fames, stirred me like whips and goads. I wanted to get up—oh, how eagerly! I wanted to shake off the garments of the commonplace in which I seemed swathed and step forth into the public arena, where I should be seen and understood for what I was. “No common man am I,” I was constantly saying to myself, and I would no longer be held down to this shabby world of collecting in which I found myself. The newspapers—the newspapers—somehow, by their intimacy with everything that was going on in the world, seemed to be the swiftest approach to all this of which I was dreaming. It seemed to me as if I understood already all the processes by which they were made. Reporting, I said to myself, must certainly be easy. Something happened—one car ran into another; a man was shot; a fire broke out; the reporter ran to the scene, observed or inquired the details, got the names and addresses of those immediately concerned, and then described it all. To reassure myself on this point I went about looking for accidents on my own account, or imagining them, and then wrote out what I saw or imagined. To me the result, compared with what I found in the daily papers, was quite satisfactory. Some paper must give me a place. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VII PICTURE a dreamy cub of twenty-one, long, spindling, a pair of gold-framed spectacles on his nose, his hair combed _à la pompadour_, a new spring suit consisting of light check trousers and bright blue coat and vest, a brown fedora hat, new yellow shoes, starting out to force his way into the newspaper world of Chicago. At that time, although I did not know it, Chicago was in the heyday of its newspaper prestige. Some of the nation’s most remarkable editors, publishers and newspaper writers were at work there: Melville E. Stone, afterward general manager of the Associated Press; Victor F. Lawson, publisher of the _Daily News_; Joseph Medill, editor and publisher of the _Tribune_; Eugene Field, managing editor of the _Morning Record_; William Penn Nixon, editor and publisher of the _Inter-Ocean_; George Ade; Finley Peter Dunne; Brand Whitlock; and a score of others subsequently to become well known. Having made up my mind that I must be a newspaper man, I made straight for the various offices at noon and at six o’clock each day to ask if there was anything I could do. Very soon I succeeded in making my way into the presence of the various city and managing editors of all the papers in Chicago, with the result that they surveyed me with the cynical fishy eye peculiar to newspaper men and financiers and told me there was nothing.