The scrap-book grew rapidly to alarming proportions, for having now my opportunity I worked hard, and Mr. Hanks was fond of telling me that I was rapidly outgrowing the reputation Doctor Todd and Mr. Pound had made for me on Park Row. Accounts of murders, suicides, yacht-races, robberies, public meetings, railroad accidents--all the varied events which make up a day's news--followed the funeral into Gladys Todd's archives. You can readily imagine that my views of life soon underwent a change. They became rather distorted, as I see them now; and was it a wonder when my day began at noon and ended in the small hours of the morning, carried me through hospitals, police-stations, and courts, from the darkest slums to the stateliest houses on the Avenue, from the sweatshop to the offices of the greatest financiers. To me all men were simply makers of news, and by their news value I judged them. A man's greatness I measured by the probable length of his obituary notice. Indeed, greatness itself was but the costume of a puppet, so often did I see the sawdust stuffing oozing from the gashes in the cloth. When I met one bank cashier simply because he had stolen, I forgot the thousands of others who were plodding away through lives of dull honesty. Because one Sunday-school superintendent sinned, I classed all his kind as sinners. Becoming versed in the devious ways of statesmen, I began to doubt the virtues of my old heroes whose speeches I had often declaimed with so much unction. I became a cynic. At twenty-two my thoughts matched the epigrams of Rochefoucauld and my philosophy that of Schopenhauer. All my old ideas as to the importance of the work I had chosen and of my own value to the world were quickly dissipated. Often I had cause to remember the Professor and his argument that even of our good actions selfishness was the main-spring, and accepting it as true, and laying bare the roots of my own motives and of those around me, I should have moved confusedly in the darkness had I not come to see more clearly what he meant by marching under sealed orders and to realize that I had a duty and that it was to live by the light I had. I did try to do this. I had a conscience, and though I might believe that it was but a group of conceptions as to the nature of right and wrong poured into my mind by my early instruction, it protested as strongly against abuse as did my digestive organs. Sometimes I had to effect strange compromises with it. Sometimes, in my never ceasing search for facts, I found myself causing pain and trouble to those who were innocently brought under the shadow of crime and scandal, but I justified myself by the theory that they suffered for the good of the many. To me the old dictum that the end justifies the means became a useful balm.