He fully recognized all its responsibilities, and the need of
meeting them and respecting them by other than casual, haphazard, and
slipshod methods. He was an economist of words, with an abhorrence of
redundance and irrelevance; not only an economist of words, but also an
economist of syllables, choosing always the fewer, and losing nothing
of force or precision by that choice. He had what was not less than a
passion for brevity. "What," he was asked, "makes a journalist?" and
he replied: "A nose for news." But with him the news had to be sifted,
verified, and reduced to an essence, not inflated, distorted and
garnished with all the verbal spoils of the reporter's last scamper
through the dictionary.
How sedate and prosperous Springfield looked to me when I arrived there
on an early spring day! How clean, orderly, leisurely, and respectable
after the untidiness and explosive anarchy of New York! I made for the
river, as I always do wherever a river is, and watched it flowing down
in the silver-gray light and catching bits of the rain-washed blue sky.
The trees had lost the brittleness and sharpness of winter's drawing
and their outlines were softening into greenish velvet.
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