IV

The first winter of my legislative correspondence began with a letter to

my Cincinnati newspaper in which I

[Illustration: _The Ohio State House at Columbus viewed from High

Street_]

described the public opening of the new State House. I remember the

event vividly because I thought it signally important, and partly

because, to relieve myself from the stress of the crowd passing through

the doorways, I lifted my arms and was near having my breath crushed

out. There were a ball and a banquet, but somewhere, somehow, amidst the

dancing and the feeding and smoking, I found a corner where I could

write out my account of the affair and so escaped with my letter and my

life.

Much as I might have wished to share socially, with such small splendor

as might be, in this high occasion, the reporter's instinct was first

with me. I was there as the representative of a great Cincinnati

newspaper, and I cared more to please its management than to take any

such part as I might in the festivity. My part was to look on and tell

what I saw, and I must have done this in the manner of my most approved

good masters, no doubt with satirically poetic touches from Heine and

bits of worldly glitter from Thackeray. I should like to see that letter

now, and I should like to know how I contrived to get it, more or less

surreptitiously, into the hands of the express agent for delivery to my

newspaper. In those days there was a good deal of talk, foolish talk, I

am since aware, of having the post-office superseded in its functions by

the express companies. Now the talk and the fact are all the other way;

but then the mail was slow and uncertain, and if my letter was of the

nature of manuscript the express might safely carry it and deliver it in

time for the next day's paper. That was rightful and lawful enough, but

there was a show of secrecy in the transaction which was not unpleasing

to the enterprise of a young reporter.

My letters, as they went on from day to day, contented the managers of

the _Gazette_ so well that when the session of the legislature ended

they gave me an invitation which might well have abused my modesty with

a sense of merit. This invitation was to come and be their city editor,

which then meant the local reporting, at a salary twice as great as that

which I had been getting as their legislative correspondent. I do not

know whose inspiration the offer was, but I should like to believe it

was that of the envoy from the paper who made it in person, after

perhaps more fully satisfying himself of my fitness. He is long since

dead, but if he were still alive I hope he would not mind my describing

him as of less stature than myself even, wearing the large, round

glasses which give certain near-sighted persons a staring look, and of

speech low almost to whispering, so that I could not quite be sure that

the incredible thing he was proposing was really expressed to me. I like

to recall the personal fact of him because he was always my friend, and

he would have found me another place on the paper if he could when I

would not take the one he had offered. He did make room for me in his

own department for as long as he could, or as I would stay, when I went

down to Cincinnati to look the ground over, and he kept me his guest as

far as sharing his room with me in the building where we worked

together, and where I used to grope my way toward midnight up a stairway

entirely black to his door. There I lighted the candle-end which I found

within and did what I could to sleep till he came, hours later, when the

paper went to press. I have the belief that the place was never swept or

dusted, and that this did not matter to the quiet, scholarly man whose

life was so wholly in his work that he did not care how he lived.

He was buoyed up, above all other things, by the interest of journalism,

which for those once abandoned to it is indeed a kind of enchantment. As

I knew it then and afterward, it has always had far more of my honor

and respect than those ignorant of it know how to render. One incident

of it at this time so especially moved me that I will give it place in

this wayward tale, though it is probably not more to the credit of the

press than unnumbered others which others could cite. A miserable man

came late one night to ask that a certain report which involved his good

name, and with it the good name of a miserable woman, and the peace of

their families, might be withheld. He came with legal counsel, and

together they threshed the matter out with our editorial force upon the

point whether we ought or ought not to spare him, our contention being

that as a prominent citizen he was even less to be spared than a more

unimportant person. Our professional conscience was apparently in that

scruple; how it was overcome I do not remember, but at last we promised

mercy and the report was suppressed.

It was one of the ironies of life that after the only suspected avenue

to publicity had been successfully guarded, the whole fact should have

cruelly come out in another paper the next morning. But I cannot feel

even yet that the beauty of our merciful decision was marred by this

mockery of fate, or that the cause of virtue was served by it, and I

think that if I had been wiser than I was then I would have remained in

the employ offered me, and learned in the school of reality the many

lessons of human nature which it could have taught me. I did not remain,

and perhaps I could not; it might have been the necessity of my morbid

nerves to save themselves from abhorrent contacts; in any case, I

renounced the opportunity offered me by that university of the streets

and police-stations, with its faculty of patrolmen and ward politicians

and saloon-keepers. The newspaper office was not the Capitol of Ohio; I

was not by the fondest imputation a part of the state government, and I

felt the difference keenly. I was always very homesick; I knew nobody

in the city, and I had no companionship except that of my constant

friend, whom I saw only in our hours of work. I had not even the poor

social refuge of a boarding-house; I ate alone at a restaurant, where I

used sadly to amuse myself with the waiters' versions of the orders

which they called down a tube into the kitchen below. The one which

cheered me most was that of a customer who always ordered a double

portion of corn-cakes and was translated as requiring "Indians, six on a

plate."

Nearly all the frequenters of this restaurant were men from their stores

and offices, snatching a hasty midday meal, but a few were women, clerks

and shop-girls of the sort who now so abound in our towns and cities,

but then so little known. I was so altogether ignorant of life that I

thought shame of them to be boldly showing themselves in such a public

place as a restaurant. I wonder what they would have thought, poor,

blameless dears, of the misgivings in the soul of the conscious youth as

he sat stealing glances of injurious conjecture at them while he overate

himself with the food which was the only thing that could appease for a

moment the hunger of his homesick heart. If I could not mercifully

imagine them, how could I intelligently endure the ravings of the

drunken woman which I heard one night in the police-station where my

abhorred duties took me for the detestable news of the place? I suppose

it was this adventure, sole of its sort, which clinched my resolve to

have no more to do with the money-chance offered to me in journalism. My

longing was for the cleanly respectabilities, and I still cannot think

that a bad thing, or if experience cannot have more than the goodly

outside in life, that this is not well worth having. There was a relief,

almost an atonement, or at least a consolation in being sent next day

to report a sermon, in fulfilment of my friend's ideal of journalistic

enterprise, and though that sermon has long since gone from me and was

perhaps at the time not distinctly with me, still I have a sense of

cleansing from the squalor of the station-house in listening to it. If

all my work could have been the reporting of sermons, with intervals of

sketching the graduating ceremonies of young ladies' seminaries, such as

that where once a girl in garnet silk read an essay of perhaps no

surpassing interest, but remained an enchanting vision, and the material

of some future study in fiction; if it could have been these things,

with nothing of police-stations in it, I might have tried longer to

become a city editor. But as it was I decided my destiny in life

differently.

V

I must not conceal the disappointment which my father delicately

concealed when I returned and took up my old work in the

printing-office. He might well have counted on my help in easing him of

his load of debt, from the salary I had forgone, but there was no hint

of this in the welcome given me in the home where I was again so doubly

at home with my books and manuscripts. Now and then my friend of the

_Gazette_ management managed to have some sketch of mine accepted for

it, and my life went on in my sister's literary companionship on much

the same terms as before our venture into the world the winter before.

My father's clerkship had ended with the adjournment of the legislature

in the spring, but in the autumn, when it grew toward winter, I asked

again for the correspondence of the _Gazette_. I got this by favor of my

friend, and then I had courage to ask for that of the Cleveland

_Herald_, which the interest of the blithe sexagenarian sufficed to

secure me, and I returned to the capital with no pretense that I was

not now writing the letters solely and entirely myself. But almost

before my labors began my health quite broke under the strain of earlier

over-study and later overwork. I gave up my correspondence for both

those honored newspapers to my father, who wrote it till the close of

the session, and at his suggestion the letters of the _Gazette_ fell the

next winter to the fit and eager hands of a young man who had just then

sold his country newspaper and had come to try his fortune in the

capital. His name was Whitelaw Reid, in the retrospect a tall, graceful

youth with an enviable black mustache and imperial, wearing his hair

long in the Southern fashion, and carrying himself with the native ease

which availed him in a worldly progress uninterrupted to the end. He

wrote the legislative letters so acceptably that when the Civil War

broke out the _Gazette_ people were glad to make him their correspondent

in the field, where he distinguished himself beyond any other war

correspondent in the West, or the East for what I knew. The world knows

how riches and honors followed him all his days, and how when he died

the greatest Empire sent his dust home to the greatest Republic in such

a war-ship as the war correspondent of those years could not have

dreamed of. From time to time we saw each other, but not often; he was

about his business in the State House, and now I was about mine in the

office of the _Ohio State Journal_, the organ of the Republican party,

which had been newly financed and placed on a firm footing after rather

prolonged pecuniary debility.

I was at home in the autumn, as I had been all the summer, eating my

heart out (as I would have said in those days) when the call to a place

on the _Journal's_ editorial staff incredibly, impossibly came, and I

forgot my ills, and eagerly responded. I hardly know how to justify my

inconsistency when I explain that this place was the same which I had

rejected at twice the salary on the Cincinnati _Gazette_. Perhaps I

accepted it now because I could no longer endure the disappointment and

inaction of my life. Perhaps I hoped that in the smaller city the duties

would not be so odious or so onerous; perhaps it was because I would

have been glad to return to Columbus on any terms; in any case it fell

out that the duties of the place were undertaken by another who doted on

them, and quite different and far more congenial functions were assigned

to me.

My chief was Henry D. Cooke, the successful editor and proprietor of a

newspaper in northern Ohio, and brother of the banker Jay Cooke, once

nationally noted in our finance and himself afterward Governor of the

District of Columbia, the easiest of easy gentlemen, formed for

prosperity and leisure, with an instinct for the choice of subordinates

qualified to do the journalistic work he soon began to relinquish in his

preoccupation with the politics of the capital. I have had no sweeter

friend in a life abounding in friends, and after fifty years I think of

his memory with gratitude for counsels which availed me much when given

and would avail me still if I should ever again be a youth of

twenty-one, proposing to do and say the things I then proposed. He

rarely blamed anything I did in the stirring and distracted period of

our relation, but one morning he brought me a too graphic paragraph,

about a long-forgotten homicide done by an injured husband, and said,

"Never, _never_ write anything you would be ashamed to read to a woman,"

and so made me lastingly ashamed of what I had done, and fearful of ever

doing the like again, even in writing fiction. It seems not to be so now

with our novelists, begun or beginning; they write many things they

ought to be ashamed to read to women, or if they are of that sex,

things they should be ashamed to read to men. But perhaps they _are_

ashamed and only hold out writing so for art's sake; I cannot very well

speak for them; but I am still very Victorian in my preference of

decency.

Mr. Cooke must have been often of a divided mind about his assistants,

or about their expression of the opinions which he reticently held in

common with them. He was a thorough Republican; he undoubtedly believed

that the time had come for calling black black, but his nature would

have been to call it dark gray, at least for that day or for the next.

He would have oftenest agreed with us in what we said of the pro-slavery

party and partisans, North and South, though he held it not honesty to

have it thus set down. He would have liked better the _milde Macht_ of a

Hahnemannian treatment, while we were blistering and cauterizing, and

letting blood wherever we saw the chance, and there were every day

chances enough. I had been made news editor, and in the frequent

intervals of our chief's abeyance I made myself the lieutenant of the

keen ironical spirit who mostly wrote our leaders, but did not mind my

dipping my pen in his ink when I could turn from the paste and scissors

which were more strictly my means of expression. My work was to look

through the exchange newspapers which flocked to us in every mail, and

to choose from them any facts that could be presented to our readers as

significant. I called my column or two "News and Humors of the Mail,"

and I tried to give it an effect of originality by recasting many of the

facts, or, when I could not find a pretext for this, by offering the

selected passages with applausive or derisive comment. We had French and

Spanish and German exchanges, and I sometimes indulged a boyish vanity

by prefacing a paragraph from these with such a sentence as, "We

translate from the _Courrier des États Unis_," or, "We find in _La

Cronaca_ of New York," or "We learn from the _Wachter am Erie_," as the

case might be. Why I should have been suffered to do this without

admonition from our chief or sarcasm from my senior I do not know;

perhaps the one thought it best to let youth have its head when the head

was harmlessly turned; and perhaps the other was too much occupied with

his own work to trouble himself with mine; but certainly if I had caught

a contemporary in such folly I should have tried what unsparing

burlesque could do to make him wiser.

The reader who has no follies to own will probably not think me wise in

owning mine, but from time to time I must do so; there were so many. It

is with no hope of repairing these follies now that I confess the pride

I felt in the poor little Spanish, German, and French which it had cost

me so much to acquire unaided and unguided, and I was willing that my

acquirements should shed luster on the newspaper I loved almost as much

as I loved myself. I admired it even more, and I wished to do all that I

could to make it admirable, even enviable, with others. I think now that

I was not using one of the best means to do it; I only contend that it

was one of the best I could think of then. If any contemporary had

turned it against us, I hope I should have been willing to suffer

personally for it, but I cannot now be sure.