"At eight o' clock one spring morning," says Mr. Sangree, "the blotter at police headquarters recorded a trifling fire on the East Side. News being dull, Davis was sent to cover it. He found a rickety tenement house in which fire had little more than singed the top floor. The crowd had left, a few ashes were smouldering, and the insurance adjusters were examining the place. "'Nothing here,' said the policeman on watch. 'Only five hundred dollars damage and a bum lodger asphyxiated. He's in that room.' "The reporters peeped, saw the blackened face and rigid form, a man unnamed and forgotten--and wrote a paragraph. _The Evening Sun_ reporter, in mousing about saw an alarm clock by the dead man's side with the hand pointing to seven o' clock. "'What time did you break in here?' he asked. "'Let me see,' yawned the bluecoat; 'Seven o' clock it was. I remember because that alarm was going off just as I got inside.' "'That's my story,' said Davis, and he began his account, touching and vivid, simply with: 'The man died at six-thirty. The alarm went off at seven. It was just half an hour too late.'" "What impressed me," said the author, discussing the story subsequently, "was that impotent alarm clock jangling away when the owner was dead. A man's existence had been cut off because that fifty-cent clock could not give its alarm a few minutes earlier." This illustrates what was meant when we said that Mr. Davis takes an objective view of life. His experience as a reporter was invaluable to him; and he took Dr. Hale's advice, and ended the experience at the right time. Doubtless many good writers have been spoiled by indulging too long in the fascinations of newspaper work. A large part of his training as a reporter the creator of Van Bibber obtained in his native city, during his service on the _Philadelphia Press_, for which paper he went to work when he was a little more than twenty. There is a portrait of him taken at the age of twenty-three, in the disguise in which he worked while getting the information which drove the nest of thieves out of Wood street. While Davis was working for the _Philadelphia Press_, by the way, he and his associates in the reporters' room fell in love with one of Stevenson's thrilling short stories, "A Lodging for the Night." They could not restrain their admiration; so they wrote an enthusiastic letter to the gentle sick man off there in Samoa. And to the spokesman of the admiring crew Stevenson replied: _Dear Sir:_