There was the _Magazine_, the _Weekly_, and _Harper’s Young People_. One of them surely would listen to my tale. I chose the _Weekly_ for some unknown reason. For some equally unknown reason I was admitted to the editor’s sanctum, and, still more strange, Richard Harding Davis listened to my tale. His success as a novelist had just begun; he had left the _Evening Sun_, where his “Van Bibber” stories had made him first known; his popularity was rising fast, though I had never heard of him. My tale was brief, having been rehearsed in the train. It took, perhaps, three minutes at most to rattle it off--my parentage, my farm and hotel, my interest in Eastern Thought, my present destitution, and I remember adding, “You see, I cannot possibly go home to England again until I have made good somehow.” “Have you written anything?” he asked, after listening patiently with raised eyebrows. “Well--no, I haven’t, not yet, I’m afraid.” I explained that I wanted to begin, though what I really wanted was only paid employment. The author of “Van Bibber” and “A Soldier of Fortune” looked me up and down and then chuckled. After a moment’s silence, he got up, led me across the hall to another door, opened it without knocking and said to a man who was seated at a table smothered in papers: “This is Mr. Blackwood, an Englishman, who wants to write something for you. He is prepared to write anything--from Eastern philosophy to ‘How to run a hotel in Canada.’” The door closed behind me, with no word of farewell, and I learned that the man facing me was the editor of _Harper’s Young People_. His name, if I remember rightly, was Storey, and he was an Englishman, who, curiously enough, almost at once mentioned my father. He had been an employé of the G.P.O. in London. He was unpleasant, supercilious, patronizing and off-hand, proud of his editorial power. He gave me, however, my first assignment--to write a short, descriptive article about a cargo of wild animals that had just arrived for the New York “Zoo.” I hurried off to the steamer, bought some paper, wrote the article in a pew of Trinity Church in Lower Broadway, and returned three hours later to submit it. Storey read it and said without enthusiasm it would do, but when I asked “Is it good?” he shook his head with the comment “Well--some men would have made more of it perhaps.” It was printed, however, and in due course I got ten dollars for it. I inquired if I could do something else. He took my address. No further results followed. Evidently, I realized, writing was not my line, and both Kay and the Red Indian Medicine Man were mistaken.