It was more or less a matter of trial and error, disappointment, and repeated effort until something happened several years later. I had quali­fied as a shorthand teacher, not of one system but several, but the idea of learning anything about my problem from shorthand never occurred to me at that time-and then I actually stumbled onto the answer.

An employment agency had sent me to teach shorthand in a business college in Shawnee, Oklahoma. About the second day it was plain that I had made a mistake. The head of the school was drunk half the time, in­deed he was drunk the afternoon he found that the local business people were talking about running him out of town, and taking over his business school for me to manage. They did get rid of him as a menace to the morals of the town, and I started to Chicago, but stopped in Wichita be­cause I had met a business college man there who looked progressive.

Actually he was just about broke, but there was a little money in my watch pocket and we made a deal whereby I would stay and teach short­hand for at least a few weeks. Possibly he hired me expecting me to stay until he vvent broke, but that summer he began advertising me as the only shorthand teacher in captivity who could write and teach seventeen systems of shorthand. Those seventeen systems and that advertising was the answer to my question. Handwriting Analysis Samples from students who had been exposed to shorthand in high school or other business colleges, came flocking into school. There were Gregg, and Spencerian and Dougherty shorthand writers. All the shades of the Pitman systems, Benn Pitman. Issac Pitman, and a dozen variations all were enrolled in my dictation classes. All I had to do was dictate, and walk around looking over their shoulders and watch for inaccuracies. It was a scatterbrained bunch for most stenographers will agree that only a handful of people ever write shorthand as it is taught.