e
rigorously for "stealing" Jim Wolf and the Cats from the Tennessee man.
I got a merciless beating, but I did not mind it. It's all in the game.
Besides, I had learned, a good while before that, that it is not wise to
keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large
advantage out of keeping it alive. Few slanders can stand the wear of
silence.

[Sidenote: (1873.)]

[Sidenote: (1900.)]

But I was not done with Jim and the Cats yet. In 1873 I was lecturing in
London, in the Queen's Concert Rooms, Hanover Square, and was living at
the Langham Hotel, Portland place. I had no domestic household, and no
official household except George Dolby, lecture-agent, and Charles
Warren Stoddard, the California poet, now (1900) Professor of English
Literature in the Roman Catholic University, Washington. Ostensibly
Stoddard was my private secretary; in reality he was merely my
comrade--I hired him in order to have his company. As secretary there
was nothing for him to do except to scrap-book the daily reports of the
great trial of the Tichborne Claimant for perjury. But he made a
sufficient job out of that, for the reports filled six columns a day and
he usually postponed the scrap-booking until Sunday; then he had 36
columns to cut out and paste in--a proper labor for Hercules. He did his
work well, but if he had been older and feebler it would have killed him
once a week. Without doubt he does his literary lectures well, but also
without doubt he prepares them fifteen minutes before he is due on his
platform and thus gets into them a freshness and sparkle which they
might lack if they underwent the staling process of overstudy.

He was good company when he was awake. He was refined, sensitive,
charming, gentle, generous, honest himself and unsuspicious of other
people's honesty, and I think he was the purest male I have known, in
mind and speech. George Dolby was something of a contrast to him, but
the two were very friendly and sociable together, nevertheless. Dolby
was large and ruddy, full of life and strength and spirits, a tireless
and energetic talker, and always overflowing with good-nature and
bursting with jollity. It was a choice and satisfactory menagerie, this
pensive poet and this gladsome gorilla. An indelicate story was a sharp
distress to Stoddard; Dolby told him twenty-five a day. Dolby always
came home with us after the lecture, and entertained Stoddard till
midnight. Me too. After he left, I w