columns of a great paper.  But how am I to do this?  I am blind, I’m an invalid; how am I to know whom I can trust?  I don’t mean in money matters; money’s nothing to me; it can do nothing for me; I mean morally, intellectually.  I’ve had scores of people pass through my hands in the last fifteen years—­Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Americans, men of so-called high family, men of humble birth, men from a dozen universities, self-taught men, young men, old men, and, my God! what have I found?  Arrogance, stupidity, ingratitude, loose thinking, conceit, ignorance, laziness, indifference; absence of tact, discretion, courtesy, manners, consideration, sympathy, devotion; no knowledge, no wisdom, no intelligence, no observation, no memory, no insight, no understanding.  My God!  I can hardly believe my own experience when I think of it.”

Set down in cold print, this outburst loses almost every trace of its intensely dramatic character.  Mr. Pulitzer spoke as though he were declaiming a part in a highly emotional play.  At times he turned toward me, his clenched fists raised above his shoulders, at times he threw back his head, flung his outstretched hands at arms’ length in front of him, as though he were appealing to the earth, to the sea, to the air, to the remote canopy of the sky to hear his denunciation of man’s inefficiency; at times he paused, laid a hand on my arm, and fixed his eye upon me as if he expected the darkness to yield him some image of my thought.  It was almost impossible to believe at such a moment that he was totally blind, that he could not distinguish night from day.

“Mind!” he continued, raising a cautionary finger, “I’m not making any criticism of my present staff; you may consider yourself very lucky if I find you to have a quarter of the good qualities which any one of them has; and let me tell you that while you are with me you will do well to observe these gentlemen and to try and model yourself on them.

“However, all that doesn’t matter so much in your case, because there’s no question of your becoming one of my personal staff.  I haven’t any vacancy at present, and I don’t foresee any.  What I want you for is something quite different.”

Imagine my amazement.  No vacancy on the staff!  What about the advertisement I had answered?  What about all the interviews and correspondence, in which a companionship had been the only thing discussed?  What could the totally different thing be of which Mr. Pulitzer spoke?

In the midst of my confusion Mr. Pulitzer said, “Look out of the window and tell me what you see.  Remember that I am blind, and try and make me get a mental picture of everything—­everything, you understand; never think that anything is too small or insignificant to be of interest to me; you can’t tell what may interest me; always describe everything with the greatest minuteness, every cloud in the sky, every shadow on the hillside, every tree, every house, every dress, every wrinkle on a face, everything, everything!”