“Tough!” Randall exclaimed; “why, my boy, I’ve often worked for two weeks on a job and then had nothing to write. You can’t expect to write much at the start, and some men never do. You will soon see that all the reporting of any importance is done by about half a dozen men. They get all the long articles to write, because they know how to do it. The rest have to take what is left. “Besides that,” Randall went on, “a new man has to wait for his opportunity. They’ll keep giving you this little work to do till some day a little thing turns out big, and then you’ll have a chance to show what stuff there is in you. That’s the way a new reporter gets a start.” “Oh!” Dick gasped; “and I had just such a chance as that last night, and lost it!” “Yes, you did,” Randall admitted; “but you can’t expect to do everything in a day. Another chance will come some day; watch for it.” Watch for it! Dick did nothing but watch for it. No matter how small his assignment was, and for days and weeks they were all small, he went about it full of the hope that it might turn out to be of importance. Sometimes he was almost discouraged, particularly when he looked about him and saw how many older men in the office, men who had been reporters for years, got no better work to do than he. Some of these men, too, were much better men than he; he could not help seeing that. They had traveled everywhere, and were thoroughly educated, and spoke many languages, but still their opportunity had not come. Perhaps his chance might never come again either. There were other things to make Dick feel uncomfortable. His mother had given him the best advice when he found that he must live in the city, and of course Dick had followed it, but he found himself very unsettled. “If you must miss the train so often,” she said to him, “you will have to live in the city; but do nothing rash till you are sure of keeping your place in the office. Rent a little room somewhere for the present, and after a while Florrie and I will move in, if everything goes well, and we can take a tiny little flat, and all live together again.” So Dick was cut off from his family, a young lone bachelor in New York; and the little hall bedroom was doleful, and the restaurant meals were growing monotonous, for he could not afford to go to the good restaurants; even the cheap ones swallowed up a large share of his salary. “Here is a meeting of the Harbor Commissioners that you can attend this morning, Mr. Sumner,” the city editor said to him one day. “They never do anything worth printing. Last time we merely said of them ‘The Harbor Commissioners met yesterday and did nothing.’ There probably will not be more than a line or two to write about them.” “Yes, sir,” said Dick, and he could not help adding mentally, “that’s the reason I get the job, I’m afraid, because it is of no account. But never mind; my chance will come some day, and then I’ll get better work.”