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TALES FROM BOHEMIA


By Robert Neilson Stephens




ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS--A MEMORY

One crisp evening early in March, 1887, I climbed the three flights of
rickety stairs to the fourth floor of the old "Press" building to begin
work on the "news desk." Important as the telegraph department was
in making the newspaper, the desk was a crude piece of carpentry. My
companions of the blue pencil irreverently termed it "the shelf." This
was my second night in the novel dignity of editorship. Though my rank
was the humblest, I appreciated the importance of a first step from "the
street." An older man, the senior on the news desk, had preceded me. He
was engaged in a bantering conversation with a youth who lolled at such
ease as a well-worn, cane-bottomed screw-chair afforded. The older man
made an informal introduction, and I learned that the youth with pale
face and serene smile was "Mr. Stephens, private secretary to the
managing editor." That information scarcely impressed me any more
than it would now after more than twenty years' experience of managing
editors and their private secretaries.

The bantering continued, and I learned that the youth cherished literary
aspirations, and that he performed certain work in connection with the
dramatic department for the managing editor, who kept theatrical news
and criticisms within his personal control.

Suddenly a chance remark broke the ice for a friendship between the
young man and me which was to last unbroken until his untimely death.
Stephens wrote the Isaac Pitman phonography! Here had I been for more
than three years wondering to find the shorthand writers of wide-awake
and progressive America floundering in what I conceived to be the
Serbonian