osition to him.
"Certainly," he said, "it is true."

The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I had
heard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I
added a closing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to
imply that I had not gone quite daft.

"These things," I wrote, "may sound queer to the ear of the country.
They may have visited me in my dreams; they may, indeed, have come to
me betwixt the sherry and the champagne, but nevertheless I do aver that
they are buzzing about here in the minds of many very serious and not
unimportant persons."

Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated and ridiculed as I,
never a simple news gatherer so discredited. Democratic and Republican
newspapers vied with one another which could say crossest things and
laugh loudest. One sentence especially caught the newspaper risibilities
of the time, and it was many a year before the phrase "between the
sherry and the champagne" ceased to pursue me. That any patriotic
American, twice elevated to the presidency, could want a third term,
could have the hardihood to seek one was inconceivable. My letter was
an insult to General Grant and proof of my own lack of intelligence
and restraint. They lammed me, laughed at me, good and strong. On each
successive occasion of recurrence I have encountered the same criticism.

Chapter the Twenty-Third

The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph
Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and
Religious Belief

I

The journalist and the player have some things in common. Each
turns night into day. I have known rather intimately all the eminent
English-speaking actors of my time from Henry Irving and Charles Wyndham
to Edwin Booth and Joseph Jefferson, from Charlotte Cushman to Helena
Modjeska. No people are quite so interesting as stage people.

During nearly fifty years my life and the life of Joseph Jefferson ran
close upon parallel lines. He was eleven years my senior; but after
the desultory acquaintance of a man and a boy we came together under
circumstances which obliterated the disparity of age and established
between us a lasting bond of affection. His wife, Margaret, had died,
and he was passing through Washington with the little brood of children
she had left him.

It made the saddest spectacle I had ever seen. As I recall it after
more than sixty years, the scene