Now, in the times of which I am about to record a few personal impressions, total disaster of the kind described here was impossible. That is to say, collapse of a newspaper did not involve the endowment of the individual members of its staff with the key of the street. For although the failure of a journal—and I have watched over the last hours of more than one or two of them—might mean a temporary crippling and a serious curtailment of income to certain members of the staff, it never involved a drought in all the springs of income. For even the most important writers on the staff of a daily newspaper had other irons in the fire. Indeed, the more important the writer, the greater the number of fires offered for the accommodation of his irons. But the adventurers in this new Fleet Street are represented as being bound body and soul to a single proprietor. They are in thrall to one insistent master. In the morning they are expected to report themselves at the office, and are then to take their places in a sort of common-room waiting for orders, much as messenger-boys at their call-centres lounge around waiting for their “turn.” The atmosphere, as I endeavour to catch it from these illuminating pages, is that of a barracks—barracks provided for an army where women serve in the ranks. One by one the anxious, nervous waiters are sent on their several missions. Their tasks are not of a very cheerful or inspiring kind. Crime-hunting, according to Mr. Gibbs, appears to be a tremendous “feature” in the journals of the period, and the crime-hunter, as observed by him, is the most virile (perhaps I had rather say the least effeminate) of these queer adventurers. He, at all events, “lives up” to his mission, and even provides his home with an object-lesson in the social strata through which he works in search of his quarry, for he has taken under his “protection” a member of the criminal classes, and established her as mistress of his flat in Battersea. Pretty well this for one of the most distinguished members of the staff of a leading Metropolitan journal! and quaint reading for those who belong to other times, and illustrated—I am happy to think—other manners. If, however, the ladies and gentlemen of the newspaper staff of the period are depicted as eccentric in both conduct and appearance, their conversation when they forgather in their gaollike common-room, or in their favourite taverns, is neither bright nor edifying. They interchange some cheap philosophical reflections, and occasionally employ a preciosity of diction which, introduced in the eighties, was laughed out of Fleet Street by the men of that bustling time. Beyond these exchanges of conversational mock-jewellery, their talk is all of “shop.” And deadly dull it is. The poor creatures never deviate into fun. Their young lives are coloured by a sense of apprehension and oppression. To them the newspaper is an awful mother. Yet her death means the sealing-up of