if any man has an eye to read and memory to
retain, he _must_, willy-nilly, be influenced by reading, and selection
from others by an able editor is often only a most ingenious and artful
method of arguing. It has very often happened to me, when I wanted to
enforce some important point, to clothe it as an anecdote or innocent
"item," and bid the foreman set it in the smallest type in the most
obscure corner. And the reader is influenced by it, utterly
unconsciously, just as we all are, and just as surely as all reflection
follows sensation--as it ever will--into the Ages!

There was much mutual robbing by newspapers of telegraphic news in those
days. Once it befell that just before the _Bulletin_ went to press a
part of the powder-mills of Dupont Brothers in Delaware blew up, and we
received a few lines of telegram, stating that Mr. Dupont himself had
saved the great magazine by actually walking on a burning building with
buckets of water, and preventing the fire from extending, at a most
incredible risk of his life. Having half-an-hour's time, I expanded this
telegram into something dramatic and thrilling. A great New York
newspaper, thinking, from the shortness of time which elapsed in
publishing, that it was all telegraphed to us, printed it as one of its
own from Delaware, just as I had written it out--which I freely forgive,
for verily its review of my last work but one was such as to make me
inquire of myself in utter amazement, "Can this be I?"--"so gloriously
was I exalted to the higher life." The result of this review was a sworn
and firm determination on my part to write another book of the same kind,
in which I should show myself more worthy of such cordial encouragement;
which latter book was the "Etruscan Legends." I ought indeed to have
dedicated it to the _New York Tribune_, a journal which has done more for
human freedom than any other publication in history.

I do not know certainly whether the brave Dupont whom I mentioned was the
Charley Dupont who went to school with me at Jacob Pierce's, nor can I
declare that a very gentlemanly old Frenchman who came to see him in 1832
was his father or grandfather, the famous old Dupont de l'Eure of the
French Revolution. But I suppose it was the latter who carried and
transformed the art of manufacturing moral gunpowder in France to the
making material explosives in America. Yes, moral or physical, we are
all but gunpowder and smoke--_pulvis et umbra su