My first week’s reporting passed in a whirl of feverish excitement. Assignments of every possible kind were hurled at me. I raced and flew about. The “Britisher,” the “English accent,” were a source of amusement to the staff, but there was no ill-nature. Cooper seemed to like me; he chuckled; he even gave me hints. “Well, Mr. Britisher, did you get it this time?” Few of my first efforts were used, the flimsy report being printed instead, but a divorce case in special sessions, and interviews with the principals in it, brought me into notice, the story being put in the front page of the first edition. When I came down on the following Monday, McCloy whipped up to me like a steel spring released. “You can cover the Tombs this morning,” he rattled. “Anything big must be in by ten at the latest. Use judgment and pick out the best stories. Don’t let anyone get a beat on you.” He flashed away, and I tore down to the Tombs Police Court. The Tombs--I can smell to-day its peculiar mixture of extremely dirty humanity, cheap scent, very old clothes, Chinese opium, stale liquor, iodoform, and a tinge of nameless disinfectant. In winter the hot-air which was the means of heating the court whose windows were never opened, and in summer the stifling, humid atmosphere, to say nothing of the added flavour of acid perspiration, were equally abominable. The building, with its copy of Egyptian architecture, vies in gloom with the prison in Venice, though the former takes unpleasant precedence--a veritable Hall of Eblis, with thick walls, impressive portals, a general air of hopeless and portentous doom about even its exterior. There was a grimness in its dark passages that made the heart sink, truly an awe-ful building. The interior was spick and span and clean as a hospital ward, but the horror of that repellent outside leaked through somehow. Both inside and outside, the Tombs Prison became as familiar to me as my room in East 19th Street; many a prisoner I interviewed in his cell, many a wretch I talked with through the bars of his last earthly cage in Murderers’ Row; I never entered the forbidding place without a shudder, nor stepped into the open air again without relief. The routine of the police court, too, became mechanical as the months went by. The various reporters acted in concert; we agreed which stories we would use, and in this way no paper got a “beat” on the others. The man on duty stood beside the Tammany magistrate, making his notes as each case came up. It was a depressing, often a painful, business. The cases rattled by very quickly--arson, burglary, forgery, gambling, opium dens, street women, all came up, but it was from assaults that we usually culled our morning assortment for the first edition. Negroes used a razor, Italians a stiletto, white men a knife, a pistol, a club or a sandbag. Women used hatpins mostly.