In desperation I rushed into Pollard’s cabin, and its unhappy occupant, with a generosity which even seasickness could not chill, gave me a bundle of Spectators, Athenaeums, and Literary Digests, with pencil marks in the margins indicating exactly what he had intended to read in the ordinary course of things.  I breathed a sigh of relief and hastened to the library, where I found J. P. very nervous and out of sorts after a bad night.

He immediately began to deplore Pollard’s absence, on the ground that it was impossible for anyone to know what to read to him at breakfast without years of experience and training.  I said nothing, feeling secure with Pollard’s prepared “breakfast food,” as we called it, in front of me.  I awaited only his signal to begin reading, confident that I could win laurels for myself without robbing Pollard, whose wreath was firmly fixed on his brow.

Alas for my hopes!  My very first sentence destroyed my chances, for I had the misfortune to begin reading something which he had already heard.  Nothing annoyed him more than this; and we all made a habit of writing “Dead” across any article in a periodical as soon as J. P. had had it, so that we could keep off each other’s trails.  I am willing to believe that this was the first and only time that Pollard ever forgot to kill an article after he had read it, but it was enough, in the deplorable state of Mr. Pulitzer’s nerves that morning, to inflict a wound upon my reputation as a breakfast-time reader which months did not suffice to heal.

With such a bad start Mr. Pulitzer immediately concluded that I was useless, and he worked himself up into such a state about it that passage after passage, carefully marked by Pollard, was greeted with,

    “Stop!  Stop!  For God’s sake!” or,

    “Next!  Next!” or,

    “My God!  Is there much more of that?” or,

“Well, Mr. Ireland, isn’t there anything interesting in all those papers?”

I bore up manfully against this until he made the one remark I could not stand.

“Now, Mr. Ireland,” he said, his voice taking on a tone of gentle reproach, “I know you’ve done your best, but it is very bad.  If you don’t believe me, just take those papers to Mr. Pollard when he feels better; don’t disturb him now when he’s ill; and show him what you read to me.  Now, just for fun, I’d like you to do that.  He will tell you that there is not a single line which you have read that he would have read had he been in your place.  I hope I haven’t been too severe with you; but I hold up my hands and swear that Mr. Pollard wouldn’t have read me a line of that rubbish.”

This was too much!  Carefully controlling my voice so that no trace of malice should be detected in it, I replied: 

“I took these papers off Mr. Pollard’s table a moment before I came to you, and the parts I have read are the parts he had marked, with the intention of reading them to you himself.”