, and
influential papers in the country. He wanted a young man to relieve
him of some of his drudgery, and I might come on at once to serve as
his private secretary. He did not doubt that I could be useful to him,
and he was no less sure that he could be useful to me. Moreover, my
idea of salary, he said--it was modest, but forty dollars a
month--"just fitted his." He was one of the great men of his time when
papers were strong or weak, potent in authority or negligible, in
proportion to the personality of the individual controlling them. He
himself was the _Republican_, as Mr. Greeley was the _Tribune_, Mr.
Bennett the _Herald_, Mr. Dana the _Sun_, Mr. Watterson the
_Courier-Journal_, and Mr. Murat Halstead the Cincinnati _Commercial_,
though, of course, like them, he tacitly hid himself behind the sacred
and inviolable screen of anonymity, and none of them exercised greater
power over the affairs of the nation than he, out of the centre, did
from that charming New England town to which he invited me. The
opportunity was worth a premium, such as is paid by apprentices in
England for training in ships and in merchants' and lawyers' offices;
the salary seemed like the gratuity of a too liberal and chivalric
employer, for no fees could procure from any vocational institution so
many advantages as were to be freely had in association with him. He
instructed and inspired, and if he perceived ability and readiness in
his pupil (this was my experience of him), he was as eager to encourage
and improve him as any father could be with a son, looking not for the
most he could take out of him in return for pay, but for the most he
could put into him for his own benefit.

Journalism to him was not the medium of haste, passion, prejudice, and
faction. He fully recognized all its responsibilities, and the need of
meeting them and respecting them by other than casual, haphazard, and
slipshod methods. He was an economist of words, with an abhorrence of
redundance and irrelevance; not only an economist of words, but also an
economist of syllables, choosing always the fewer, and losing nothing
of force or precision by that choice. He had what was not less than a
passion for brevity. "What," he was asked, "makes a journalist?" and
he replied: "A nose for news." But with him the news had to be sifted,
verified, and reduced to an essence, not inflated, distorted and
garnished with all the verbal spoils of the reporter's last sca