Such training in writing as the reporter gets on his newspaper, I got on returning to my home in Berlin, and having my "copy" most rigidly cut to pieces by my mother. Of course this was not newspaper training in the sense that I had to report, and to a city editor. But it was all the training I ever had in writing that amounted to anything, until in after years I was interested enough in the business to observe for myself, in such examples of good writing as came to my hand, how, as Robert Louis Stevenson indicates in one of his books, language may be made to fit most tightly around the subject matter in hand. CHAPTER XXI I RETURN TO AMERICA In the early spring of 1898 I made up my mind once and for all that it was high time for me to leave Europe and get back to my own country if I ever intended to get to work with young men in my profession, or in any other activity in which I might be able to hold my own. Europe had not palled on me--far from it! To have lingered on in Berlin, in Rome or in Venice would have pleased me at that time, had I possessed the necessary means to linger, wander and observe. Had I had financial independence and no sense of responsibility, I might have been in Europe to-day as a resident. In 1898 our country went to war with Spain. How the rumors of war affected other young Americans studying, traveling, or on business in Europe at that time, I do not know. In me the rumors of war created an uncontrollable desire to return to my native land. Perhaps I thought I could go to war in her defense. It is impossible for me now to analyze, as I should like to do, my determination in 1898 to get away from Europe, university studies and all that the life abroad had meant to me, just as quickly as possible. My mother was aghast at this resolution on my part. She said to me: "If you were going to China, Kamtchatka, Tibet or almost any other place but America, I could easily think it a very natural thing to do. But America! I feel as if I should lose all touch with you." I suppose that my mother was fearful that on returning to America I would also return to all the unpleasantness, devilishness and lawlessness which I had pretty successfully run away from when I shipped as a coal-passer in Hoboken in 1889, on the poor old steamship _Elbe_. Furthermore, I think it not unlikely that my mother herself had lived so long in Europe, and had been able to keep such close track of me there, that she had a notion that we were always to live in Europe, and that there I must somehow win or lose. Then, again, there is no doubt that it disappointed my mother very much that I would not continue in the university and take my degree. But something impelled me on my course, and in the spring of 1898 I said good-by to the university, to Berlin, to Germany and to all Europe as places in which I desired to cast my lot.