ranging through all classes in the community, he must pick and choose the salient features and the most reliable evidence on which to base his story. In ten hours a good newspaper man can get the material for a column cable on almost any “visible situation.” This in the main will be accurate and correct. The moment he has gotten his message off, he begins to sketch out his campaign for the coming days or weeks which he expects the trouble to last. He picks out a half dozen reliable agents and sends them all over town, interviewing, observing, collecting data and local color in all quarters. If he knows his business he has a small but efficient staff in forty-eight hours, which keep him posted as to the general trend of affairs all over the city. If the wires are working, he can probably pick up local informants in neighboring towns to reinforce his story with ideas and viewpoints. If there is fighting going on he tries to see it without too much risk, so as to get the “local color,” which only presence on the scene can give. The dull days are filled in by interviews with as many prominent people as can be induced to talk. Thus, what seems to an outsider as a difficult proposition and one involving guesswork and inaccuracy, becomes a very simple matter. It was in much this way that I gathered material for my Odessa cable. I had not time to collect a local staff, for I only remained thirty-six hours, but I made out fairly well on the collection of local information by turning Morris and three or four members of my crew loose for the day to talk with everyone possible. My dispatches to the consulate gave me quick and easy access to the official view, while a number of stranded war correspondents at the hotel regaled me with information, which they could not get out themselves on account of the telegraph and postal tie-up all over Russia. One rarely drops on a good situation without meeting a handful of old friends on similar business bent. In Odessa almost the first man I met ashore was Lionel James of the London _Times_, in my opinion the best of all the English cable correspondents. He had been in command of the _Times_ dispatch boat _Haimun_ in the Russo-Japanese war, and for months had been competing in the news zone against the dispatch boat I was operating for the Chicago _Daily News_. I first met him in Chefoo Harbor and again in Ping Yang Inlet in Korea. He joined the second army and scored a beat on the cable from Lioa Yang, which broke the Japanese securities in the London money market. I lost track of him and did not see him again until Red Sunday days in Petersburg. I was hurried up from a little investigation of a war scare in the Balkans and almost the first man I met in the hotel in Petersburg was James. For a few weeks I saw him daily, and again we parted. He had been on half a dozen assignments and I around the world when we met on the street in Odessa that cold December day.