We were called the Griffou push. Nearly every member of this organization was a writer of some kind, or intended to be. Perhaps I was the first of the original intimates in this little gathering to take up residence at the Griffou Hotel in Ninth Street, which for several years was our regular rendezvous and from which we got our corporate appellation. I began to live there almost immediately after my preliminary work for the Pennsylvania Company. There was something quaintly foreign about the place at that time that satisfied my soul, and it was located in the Washington Square neighborhood, which will never be outdone in my affections by any other in New York. Although I have lived all over the city, somehow on leaving the ferry, coming back to New York on a journey, my steps naturally turn toward lodgings near the Washington arch. I think that several of the other young men have always felt likewise about this locality. Anyhow, here I began my fight for a place in the city's business. I have said that we were writers, or rather aspirants for distinction, as such. Why all of us should have picked out this activity as the one in which we thought we could do best I can hardly explain. That we were overweaningly literary on first coming together does not seem to me to be the case. One or two had written what were called academic essays at the time, but none, I think, had done much money-making writing. For some reason--perhaps it looked like the easiest thing to do--we all threw our lot in with that army of men and women in New York who try to make their living with their pens. I tried first for a position as a police reporter. I thought that if my experience and training had prepared me to write about anything in a big city they had fitted me for reportorial work as an observer in police and criminal circles. My ambition in this direction came to nothing. I honestly tried for the position in question on several newspapers, but the editors did not see their way clear to be enthusiastic about my ability. For several years after starting out in New York I continued to annoy editors with my notions on their police reporting, but without avail. As I had once been ambitious to be foreign correspondent, and thought that with perseverance I could fill the bill, so, during the years that I begged to be made a police reporter, another disappointment and chagrin had to be jotted down in my notebook. Perhaps it is just as well now that I did not succeed in my efforts with the editors along these lines. But whether this be so or not I propose here, in what is my own book and nobody else's, to give a short outline of what I believe police reporting could be developed into if undertaken seriously.