There is, of course, no royal road to journalism, but there are short-cuts that can be learned. I gave them points on the idiosyncrasies of the new man at the city desk, for I knew him well, and I provided each of them with a yarn about his supposed previous place. One, I believe, was to have worked on the St. Louis _Globe-Herald_, under George Comstock; one had done special writing on the Minneapolis _Argus_, and so on; for I knew a lot about all the papers in the East, and I fixed my men so they couldn’t easily be tripped up on their autobiographies. They went down to the _Herald_ office that night, and after I had waited an hour or so, I had the satisfaction of hearing that all three of my pupils had been accepted. It was agreed that each of them was to give me half his salary, and so I had a fair show of earning a man and a half’s wages as President of the Great Bauer Syndicate. At one o’clock the next afternoon I sat down in Coffee John’s and waited for my subordinates to report. As each man came in I gave him minute instructions as to the best possible way of obtaining his information. There was not a trick in the trade I didn’t know, and I had never been beaten by any paper in town. I had succeeded in obtaining interviews at two in the morning from persons avowedly hostile to my sheet, I had got photographs nobody else could get, and I had made railroad officials talk after an accident. Without conceit, I may claim to be a practical psychologist, and where most men know only one way of getting what they want, I know four. My men had little excuse for failing to obtain their stories, and they walked out of Coffee John’s like automata that I had wound up for three hours. They returned between four and five o’clock, gave me the information they had secured, and, while they reported to the city editor, received instructions as to writing the story, and got their evening’s assignment, I wrote the articles at railroad speed. I could tell as well as any city editor how much space the stories were worth, and wrote the head-lines accordingly—for in the _Herald_ office every reporter was his own head-line writer. If by any chance the editor’s judgment were not the same as mine, it took but a few minutes to cut the thing down or pad it to any length, and my men took the copy back before they went out on the next detail. Meanwhile, I had given them their new directions, and, when they turned up, toward ten and eleven at night, I had the whole batch of writing to do again. It was a terrific pace for any one man to keep up, and I doubt if anyone else in San Francisco could have kept three busy and turned out first-class work.