After I had waited an hour or so, a boy came up and said: “The city editor wants to see you.” I hurried forward to the desk of that Poohbah, who merely handed me a small clipping from another paper giving an account of some extra-terrestrial that had been taking place in a near Elizabeth, and told me to “see what there is in that.” Unsophisticated as I was as to the ways of the , and assuming, Western-fashion, that I might ask a question of my new chief, I ventured a feeble “Where is that?” For my pains I received as contemptuous a look as it is possible for one human being to give another.  
“Back of the directory! Back of the directory!” came the semi-savage reply, and not quite realizing what was meant by that I , trying to think it out.
 
Almost mechanically I went to the directory, but through that part of it which relates to streets and their numbers I began to realize that Elizabeth was a town and not a street. At a desk near the directory I noticed a man of perhaps forty, rotund and agreeable, who seemed to be less fierce and self-centered than some of the others. He had evidently only recently entered, for he had kicked off a pair of overshoes and laid a greatcoat over a chair beside him and was .
 
“Can you tell me how I can get to Elizabeth?” I inquired of him.
 
“Sure,” he said, looking up and beginning to . “I haven’t been in the city very long myself, but I know where that is. It’s on the Central, about twelve miles out. You’ll catch a local by going down to the Liberty Street ferry. I heard him tell you ‘Back of the directory,’” he added . “You mustn’t mind that—that’s what they always tell you here, these smart alecks,” and he , very much like my friend McCord. “They’re the most inconsiderate lot I ever went up against, but you have to get used to it. Out where I came from they’ll give you a civil answer once in a while, but here it’s ‘Back of the directory,’” and he chuckled again.
 
“And where do you come from?” I asked.
 
“Oh, Pittsburgh originally,” he said, which same gave me a spiritual lift, “but I haven’t been in the game for several years. I’ve been doing press agent work for a road show, one of my own,” and he chuckled again. “I’m not a stranger to New York exactly, but I am to this paper and this game down here.”
 
I wanted to stay longer and talk to him, but I had to hurry on this my first assignment in New York. “Is this your desk?” I asked.
 
“No; they haven’t to give me one yet,” and he chuckled again. “But I suppose I will get one eventually—if they don’t throw me out.”
 
“I hope I’ll see you when I get back.”
 
“Oh, I’ll be around here, if I’m not out in the snow. It’s tough, isn’t it?” and he turned to his work again. I out through that same anteroom where I had been restrained, and observed to my pestiferous opponents: “Now just take notice, Eddie. I belong here, see? I work here. And I’ll be back in a little while.”
 
“Oh, dat’s all right,” he replied with a grin. “We gotta do dat. We gotta keep mosta dese hams outa here, . Dat’s de orders we got.”
 
“Hams?” I thought. “They let these little speak of strangers as hams! That’s New York for you!”
 
I made the short commuters’ trip to Elizabeth. When I found my graveyard and the caretaker thereof, he said there was no truth in the story. No man by the name of the dead man mentioned had ever been buried there. No noises or appearances of any kind had been recorded. “They’re always publishing things like that about New Jersey,” he said. “I wish they’d quit it. Some newspaper fellow just wanted to earn a little money, that’s all.”
 
I tramped back, caught a train and reached the office at eight. Already most of the assignments had been given out. The office was comparatively empty. The city editor had gone to dinner. At a desk along a wall was a long, lean, dyspeptic-looking man, his eyes shaded by a green shield, whom I took to be the night editor, so large was the pile of “copy” beside him, but when I ventured to approach him he merely glared sourly. “T............