In a dark corner of this machinery shop I introduced myself with trepidation to McCloy, mentioning Mr. Laffan’s name, and saw the blank look come and go, as he stared at me with “Blackwood, Blackwood?... Oh, yes, I remember! You’re fifteen dollars a week. A Britisher from Canada.... Well, you’ll have to look lively here!” He seemed so intensely busy and preoccupied, his mind so charged with a sort of electric activity, that I wondered he had time to open and shut his mouth. A small, thin man, with the slightest of frail bodies, nervous, delicately shaped hands, gimlet eyes that pierced, a big head with protruding forehead, a high-pitched, twanging voice that penetrated easily above the roar of the machinery, and a general air of such lightning speed and such popping, spitting energy that I felt he might any moment flash into flame or burst with a cracking report into a thousand pieces--this was the man on whom my living depended for many months to come. The phrase “New York hustler,” darted across my mind; it stood in the flesh before me; he lived on wires. Buried among this mechanic perfection, however, I caught, odd to relate, an incongruous touch--of kindness, even of tenderness. There were gentle lines in that electric face. He had a smile I liked. “What are you out here for? Where have you come from? What have you been doing? What d’you know?” he asked with the rapidity of a machine-gun. The shorthand rate must have been 400 words per minute. I never talked so quickly in my life as in my brief reply. I watched the smile come and go. While he listened, he was shouting instructions to reporters then streaming in, to office boys, to printers, to sub-editors; but his eyes never left my face, and when I had finished my lightning sketch, the machine-gun crackled with its deadliest aim again: “Only _one_ thing counts here; get the news and get it _quick_; method of no consequence. Get the news and get it _first_!” He darted off, for the first edition went to press at 10.30. As he went, however, he turned his head a moment. “Write a story,” he backfired at me. “Write your experiences--From Methodism to Running a Saloon,”--and he vanished amid the whirling machinery in the back of the great room. I have the pleasantest recollections of W. C. McCloy; he was just, fair, sympathetic, too, when time permitted; he showed me many little kindnesses; he was Presbyterian, his parents Scotch; he was also--sober. I proved a poor reporter, and my salary remained at fifteen dollars all the time I was with the paper, yet once he kept a place open for me for many weeks; he even took me back when the consideration was hardly deserved.