When the city editor reached his desk at ten o’clock in the morning he found this note among a dozen others, and, after reading it, he laid it under a paper weight till the rush of morning work was over. Then he took it up again and wrote a very short letter to “Mr. Richard Sumner, Russellville,” and sent it to the mail box. The fewer letters a man gets the longer he takes to answer them; and the city editor of the Transport gets so many that he answers each one on the instant. Dick was in blissful ignorance of all this; and when he was sent after the evening mail, about five o’clock, it gave him a start to find a letter addressed to himself, with The Daily Transport printed across the envelope in big type. “Dear Sir,” the letter read, “I should be glad to have you call and see me at The Daily Transport office any day before six o’clock P.M. “Truly yours, J. H. Brown, _City Editor_.” When Dick showed this note to the editor of the Record, that gentleman merely gave an “I-told-you-so” smile and said: “Those fellows don’t waste much time, do they?” But when he read it at home before supper to his mother and Florrie, it threw the household into confusion. “O Dick!” his mother exclaimed; and Dick noticed that she turned her head away, “they want you to write more for them, I know they do; and to think that I almost wanted you to leave the business and work in a saw-mill! Of course they would send for you, you write so well; and your being a printer is a great help, for you could help to print the paper.” “I don’t believe that’s what it is about,” said Florrie. Happy as she was over Dick’s success, she could not help teasing him a little. “I think Dick has made some bad mistake in his article, and they want him to come and explain it.” But while she spoke Florrie stood behind his chair stroking his head; and more than one Russellville boy would have been glad to sit in Dick’s chair at that moment. “You must not have such an idea, mother,” Dick answered. “I have great hopes that they will give me something to do, from what Mr. Davis told me to-day. But it would be something very small, at the best. It was not my writing they cared for, but the news I took them. I can write a plain statement well enough, but what is that compared with the way that most of those Transport men can write? Even if they give me a chance, I may not be able to please them.” It was fortunate for Dick that he was as honest with the city editor a few days later as he was with his mother. Men go to see the city editor every day who try to pass themselves for something they are not, and the editor sees through their little deception in a minute and shakes them off. But Dick told everything about himself frankly. Instead of trying to magnify himself he said that he was working in a printing-office for three dollars a week; that he was a little past eighteen years old, and had been through the Russellville public school.