The next morning you are seated at a flat-top desk in the second-floor office. You have your drawing material and are designing a new booklet cover for the stationery department of A. C. McClurg. It is understood that when orders for drawing fail you will fill in by setting type. Now you are, at nineteen, a full-fledged designer and working at a window opposite Spalding’s. On playing days you watch Pop Anson and his be-whiskered team enter a barge and depart for the ball park. One day a young man appears at K & L’s with proofs of halftone engravings. He has been with the Mathews Northrup Press in Buffalo, where he had learned the process. He is now starting an engraving plant in Chicago. K & L print some specimen sheets on coated paper. These are probably the first halftones ever engraved in Chicago, also the first printing of halftones. K & L are Chicago’s leading commercial printers, quality considered. Mr. Knight is a retired Board of Trade operator. Mr. Leonard is the practical printer. He is also the father of Lillian Russell. Once, when she is appearing in Chicago, Miss Russell visits at the office. You are thrilled. A man, trained in Germany, grinds ink for K & L. He is located on the floor above the office. You occasionally visit him. He gives you much good advice. The _Inter Ocean_, located on the next corner, installs a color press. The K & L ink expert helps get out the first edition. For two years or more you occupy that desk and never again see the composing room. During this period, while receiving twenty-four dollars a week, you marry that young lady of your ten-year-old romance. The J. M. W. Jeffery Co., show printers, is turning out some swell posters designed by Will Crane. They are printed from wood-blocks and are wonders. An artist by the name of Frank Getty is designing labels in the Chicago sales-office of the Crump Label Company. They are a glorious departure from the conventional truck of the label lithographers. Joe Lyendecker is designing covers in color for paper-bound novels. They are gorgeous. There are no art magazines or other publications helpful to designers. You, like others, have a scrap-book made up of booklet covers, cards and other forms of advertising. A designer by the name of Bridwell is doing some thrilling work for Mathews Northrup in Buffalo, a concern that is setting a stiff pace for other railroad printers. Abbey, Parsons, Smedley, Frost and Pennell, and Charles Graham in _Harper’s Weekly_, are models for all illustrators. You are now free-lancing and making designs for Mr. Kasten of the McClurg stationery department. You have a studio in the new Caxton building on Dearborn Street. You work all of one day and night and part of the next day on some drawings for Mr. Kasten. He comes to get them at four o’clock on the afternoon before Christmas. You tell him you haven’t eaten since the previous night.