In the daytime he was a reporter on an evening newspaper of sensational
and lying habits. His work was chiefly in the police courts; and in his
spare hours at night, when not too tired or too empty, he wrote sketches
and stories for the magazines that very rarely saw the light of day on
their printed and paid-for sentences. On this particular occasion he was
deep in a most involved tale of a psychological character, and had just
worked his way into a sentence, or set of sentences, that completely
baffled and muddled him.
He was fairly out of his depth, and his brain was too poorly supplied
with blood to invent a way out again. The story would have been
interesting had he written it simply, keeping to facts and feelings, and
not diving into difficult analysis of motive and character which was
quite beyond him. For it was largely autobiographical, and was meant to
describe the adventures of a young Englishman who had come to grief in
the usual manner on a Canadian farm, had then subsequently become
bar-keeper, sub-editor on a Methodist magazine, a teacher of French and
German to clerks at twenty-five cents per hour, a model for artists, a
super on the stage, and, finally, a wanderer to the goldfields.
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