The Metropolitan Newspaper (New York City)

one in the hail and the others outside, and the city editor-in-chief divides his staff into five or six squads, which are each assigned to a particular stand, under the direction of one of their own number. The men are next assigned to a "take," that is to say, each man takes notes for fifteen minutes more or less, in turn, and then rushes to the office, where he writes his matter up. Thus the first "take" has been edited and put into type hours before the man assigned to the last "take" has left the hail.

This brings me to the night editors of the City Department, by whom all the matter of the reporters is read and revised. They are two in number, and their positions are of great responsibility. Beginning duty at five or six o'clock in the afternoon, they are occupied until two in the morning improving bad English, condensing diffuse articles, toning down broad or libelous statements, and preventing all waste of space.

The City Department includes several smaller departments, to which regular men are permanently assigned. The police department is one, and an able reporter is constantly stationed at head-quarters to gather the news that arrives there of crimes, fires, and other disasters. The mayor's office, the coroners' offices, the surrogate's office, the courts, the head-quarters of the Fire Department, and every point at which an item may be gleaned, are also occupied, and a small vessel cruises about the harbor night and day in search of the incoming ships and steamers which bring foreign papers and letters.

Should we follow the reporters from the time they leave the office in the morning until they are relieved at night; we would he led to stranger scenes than the Jersey coast, and among stranger people than the surfmen at the wreck. One man becomes a detective in the unravelment of some municipal fraud, and is closeted at one hour with a justice of the Supreme Court, the next hour with a notorious gambler in his saloon, the next with a prominent politician in the sumptuous parlor of a fashionable club, and the next with a poverty-stricken ex-office-holder in a garret. Every grade of society and every neighborhood are visited by him in his investigations. No rebuff discourages him, no accumulation of disappointments exhausts his patience, and nothing satisfies him except the information necessary to the completeness of his article. Another would be found with a squad of health-officers and policemen inspecting the sub-cellar tenements of a poor neighborhood, or "raiding" the infamous resorts in Greene or Mercer Street; another passes the day at a religions conference, another at a horse-race, another in the anteroom of a sick millionaire's chamber, another amid the strife of Wall Street, and another at a meeting of coopers, or boiler-makers, or physicians, or actors, or seamen. The scenes change without intermissions. Now the music is slow, now it is lively; now mirrors and crystal pendants to the candelabra multiply the lights, and then the darkness is made darker by the pale and sickly flicker of a taper. All the woe and gayety, the penury and the splendor, the crying want and the spendthrift luxury, of the great metropolis are known to the reporter as no other man knows them. That facile pencil of his punctures every vein of life, and no place is too inconvenient for its use. In the street car as he rides down town to his office, in the dépôt while he waits for a train, or in the train amid the distracting noise of the locomotive, he plies it with superlative energy and industry.