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an asset to the paper owned by him, the New York Log. A matter of form only; Jock was as good as hired, sight unseen. But he did not know this, and the meeting seemed to him crucial and precarious. He dressed for it with vast attention to detail, and, in the conviction that the first requirement of a reporter was punctuality, reached the appointed place on the stroke of one—and waited half an hour.

While he waited, he planned the dialogue to come. "Then he'll say" . . . "Then I'll say" . . . He examined his watch at minute intervals, and once he held it to his ear. As one-thirty approached he was assailed by a panicky suspicion that Mr. Havens had declined to present himself after all. In fancy he saw Mr. Havens, a sort of Johnny-grown-old with a beard and a belly, pounding his fist on a pile of newspapers and roaring, "Why should I waste my time?"

Why, indeed? Jock could think of no good reason, and it began to seem to him that his mere presence here in expectation of the Great was most presumptuous.

But Mr. Havens came, and was not ostentatiously Great at all, but quite human. You felt at once that he enjoyed cards and horse races, that he commanded a supply of excellent stories, and that he had a cellar full of bottles with cobwebs upon them. That type of man. He was of medium height, thick-set, with an abundance of graying hair, a square strong face, and at once the shrewdest and jolliest eyes Jock had ever seen. He spoke in an abbreviated way, as though before presenting each sentence he mentally blue-penciled it to the bone. "Late," he said, pumping Jock's hand. "Kept you waiting. Couldn't help it. How're you? Glad to know you."

Nor was the ensuing meal at all as Jock had thought