ount for this. One evening at a dinner Mr. Blaine
enlightened me. We sat together at table and suddenly he turned and
said: "How are you getting on with your bill?" And my reply being rather
halting, he continued, "You won't get a vote in either House," and he
proceeded very humorously to improvise the average member's argument
against it as a dangerous power, a perquisite to the great newspapers
and an imposition upon the little ones. To my mind this was something
more than the post-prandial levity it was meant to be.

Not long after a learned but dissolute old lawyer said to me, "You need
no act of Congress to protect your news service. There are at least two,
and I think four or five, English rulings that cover the case. Let me
show them to you." He did so and I went no further with the business,
quite agreeing with Mr. Blaine, and nothing further came of it. To a
recent date the Associated Press has relied on these decisions under the
common law of England. Curiously enough, quite a number of newspapers
in whose actual service I was engaged, opened fire upon me and roundly
abused me.

II

There appeared upon the scene in Washington toward the middle of the
seventies one of those problematical characters the fiction-mongers
delight in. This was John Chamberlin. During two decades "Chamberlin's,"
half clubhouse and half chophouse, was all a rendezvous.

"John" had been a gambler; first an underling and then a partner of the
famous Morrissy-McGrath racing combination at Saratoga and Long Branch.
There was a time when he was literally rolling in wealth. Then he went
broke--dead broke. Black Friday began it and the panic of '73 finished
it. He came over to Washington and his friends got him the restaurant
privileges of the House of Representatives. With this for a starting
point, he was able to take the Fernando Wood residence, in the heart of
the fashionable quarter, to add to it presently the adjoining dwelling
of Governor Swann, of Maryland, and next to that, finally, the Blaine
mansion, making a suite, as it were, elegant yet cozy. "Welcker's," erst
a fashionable resort, and long the best eating-place in town, had been
ruined by a scandal, and "Chamberlin's" succeeded it, having the
field to itself, though, mindful of the "scandal" which had made its
opportunity, ladies were barred.

There was a famous cook--Emeline Simmons--a mulatto woman, who
was equally at home in French dishes and Maryland-Virginia ki