In dusty little pens about the august editorial chair toiled some ten or twelve sadly dilapidated literary hacks, waifs of the sea of journalism that had been washed up on the inhospitable shores of the syndicate bureau. They were, as a rule, old men eking out a simple existence on their few dollars a week, and, after frugal repasts at the noonday hour, when the wheels of creative imagination suspended for luncheon, dilating pensively on the old days, the good old palmy days of Greeley and Dana and Godkin, when to wield the pen was a labor of love and honor, when a newspaper man was not a walking sweat-shop of letters, whereby literature was turned out in job lots and articles were manufactured at so much the dozen. It had not taken Hartley long to find that the United News Bureau was looked on with considerable contempt, with even hatred, by the ordinary New York newspaper writer. These upholders of sometimes dubiously conventional journalism made it a rule always to refer to the bureau as "the Boiler-Plate Factory," and night and day they watched it with suspicious eyes for evidences of violated copyright. But the bureau knew its business, and the different members of its staff had long since been schooled in the deft execution of what was not inappropriately termed a "plate sneak." This form of literary gymnastics consisted in the bodily appropriation of any desired article, sermon, story, or essay, the copy purloined being neatly disguised by a false face, as it were, in the substitution of a freshly written introduction. An original paragraph or two was attached to the end, with, perhaps, the interpolation of an occasional new sentence throughout the body of the thing purloined. As the bureau dealt in everything from anniversary poetry to syndicated political addresses, the field for its predatory activities was practically unlimited. A short story could be made by transplanting a De Maupassant peasant to a New England farm, or the interjection of a Kipling recruit into an Arizona mining-camp. The old-time action was jealously preserved in the transformation, the only alterations being those essential to a change of climate and conditions--and, presto, one had a new tale as bright and glittering as a freshly minted penny.