should have been. Be this as it may, I have to confess with regret that
in reporting my turn of the great statesman's speech I made one woeful
blunder. Lord Russell said (I quote from memory) that we saw now in the
New World that which had so often been seen in the Old--a struggle on the
one side for empire and on the other for independence. Now in the system
of shorthand which I had learned, the word "independence" is represented
by an arbitrary symbol, consisting of two dots, one above the other, like
a colon. When I came to write out my turn, I found to my horror that the
signification of this particular symbol had escaped my memory. There it
was, staring me in the face from my note-book, but what it meant for my
very life I could not at the moment tell. And the telegraph messengers
were pestering me for my copy, and, worst of all, the reporters from
London seemed to my guilty conscience to be eyeing me askance, and
wondering what the delay meant. In a desperate moment I made a guess, not
at the meaning of my symbol, but at some word which might take its place,
and possibly pass unnoticed; so I represented Lord Russell as having said
that we saw in the New World, what we had often seen in the old, a
struggle on the one side for empire, and on the other for power. If it
did not make absolute nonsense of the speaker's words, it certainly
robbed them of all their point and meaning, and yet history is based upon
blunders like this. And years afterwards I saw in a certain volume this
mutilated sentence printed as Lord Russell's judgment upon the causes of
the great rebellion. Never did anybody feel more ashamed of himself than
I did at that time, and never again was I caught in a similar dilemma.

Newcastle was very fond in those days of entertaining the distinguished
stranger. Lord Russell's visit in 1861 had been such a success that
twelve months later the Liberals of the town resolved to invite Mr.
Gladstone to be their guest. Mr. Gladstone was at that time Chancellor of
the Exchequer. It was not very long since he had ceased to be a