The plague of possessions, at any rate, has never troubled me, either actually or in desire, while the instinct to reduce life to its simplest terms has strengthened. The homeless feeling of living in my trunks is happiness, the idea of domesticity appals, and the comforts of rich friends wake no echo in me, assuredly no envy. A home, as a settled place one owns and expects to live in for years, perhaps for ever, is abhorrent to every instinct in me, and when acquaintances show off with pride their cottage, their flat, their furniture, their “collections,” even their “not a bad little garden, is it?” my heart confesses to a vague depression which makes it difficult to sympathise and give them my blessing. Life, at its longest, is absurdly brief before health and energy begin to slip downhill; it is mapped with a cunning network of ruts and grooves from which, once in, it is difficult to escape; only the lucky ones are never caught, although the “caught” are lucky perhaps in another way--they do not realize it. Yet even to-day, when times are bad and the horizon not too clear for some time ahead, the old dread of starvation rises in me; I never see apple rings in a grocer’s window without getting their taste and feeling them rise and swell within me like some troublesome emotion.... To my year and a-half on the _New York Times_ I look back with nothing but pleasure; the slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print,” was practised; and the men I worked with were a good company of decent fellows. Muldoon, a fighting Irishman with a grim fierce manner and a warm heart, had a sense of humour and a gift for encouraging his reporters that made them love him. C. W. Miller was editor in chief, and Carey, manager. Who owned the paper I have forgotten, but it was not Colonel Jones who was present at the Union League Club dinner to my father, when I made my maiden speech some nine years before. Hours of work were from noon until the night assignment was turned in, which meant any time from ten o’clock onwards; though, as emergency man, in case of something happening late, I often had to stay in the office till after one in the morning. Proper food, a new suit, comradeship with a better class of men, came, perhaps, just in time for me. I remember the pleasure of writing home about my new post. I had a dress-suit again. I saved $15 a week. Reporting for a New York newspaper can never be uneventful, but the painful incidents of life make deeper impressions than the pleasant ones. To meet the former means usually to call upon one’s reserves, and memory hence retains sharper pictures of them corresponding to the greater effort. On the _Times_ I was happy.