Now it so happened by a curious coincidence that just about the time I was penning these sentences in happy Holloway, a youth fresh from Harvard, the heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the United States, was deciding to devote his life to the journalistic profession. Mr. W. R. Hearst was the son of Senator Hearst, one of the lucky handful of men who came out from the development of the silver mines of the Far West with many solid millions of sterling gold in his possession. As heir to the Hearst millions, nothing would have been more in accordance with the ways of the millionaire class than for the young graduate to have given himself up to a life of self-indulgent ease. Young Hearst, however, had no inclination for sloth. Journalism attracted him, and he set himself to learn the business of the craft. Money, of course, was available to secure him ample opportunity to indulge his whim, and before long he began to try his prentice hand as editor and proprietor of the _San Francisco Examiner_. He soon proved that he possessed the editorial instinct as well as the capitalist’s purse, and the _Examiner_ began to be heard of far beyond the Pacific Coast as one of the smartest specimens of American journalism. But the Pacific Coast is a long way off. To reign in San Francisco is less than to serve in New York, and Mr. Hearst soon began to turn a longing eye to the Eastern capital. The same loadstone that drew Mr. Pulitzer from St. Louis to make the _New York World_ the latest and greatest of American newspapers, compelled Mr. Hearst to come to the same city to found a newspaper which would be even later and greater than the _World_. It was with Mr. Hearst as it was with Themistocles when the laurels of Miltiades would not allow him to sleep. The laurels of Mr. Pulitzer were equally productive of insomnia in the _Examiner_ office. At last, when Senator Hearst died, and the young editor of thirty found himself in undisputed control of a million or two--pounds, not dollars--with a reversionary right, on the death of his mother, to several millions more, he was in a position to realise his ambition. Crossing the continent, he purchased the _New York Morning Journal_ from Mr. Pulitzer’s brother Albert, and began the siege of New York. The _World_ was then in the height of its prosperity. In ten years it had built up a circulation without a rival in the Western hemisphere. The Paris _Petit Journal_ alone distanced the _World_ in Europe. The great gilded dome of the _World_ office, which every night, radiant with electric light, sits as a crown of flame upon the city’s brow, did not rise more conspicuously above the other buildings in its vicinity than the _World_ towered aloft above its contemporaries. When Mr. Hearst sat down in New York he had one ambition, and--so far as he allowed any one to see his secret thoughts--one ambition only. He would publish a newspaper which would beat the _World_.