III


I take it that the early steps of every man to get a footing may be of
interest when fairly told. I sought work in New York with indifferent
success. Mr. Raymond of the Times, hearing me play the piano at which from
childhood I had received careful instruction, gave me a job as "musical
critic" during the absence of Mr. Seymour, the regular critic. I must have
done my work acceptably, since I was not fired. It included a report of the
debut of my boy-and-girl companion, Adelina Patti, when she made her first
appearance in opera at the Academy of Music. But, as the saying is, I did
not "catch on." There might be a more promising opening in Washington, and
thither I repaired.

The Daily States had been established there by John P. Heiss, who with
Thomas Ritchie had years before established the Washington Union. Roger A.
Pryor was its nominal editor. But he soon took himself home to his beloved
Virginia and came to Congress, and the editorial writing on the States was
being done by Col. A. Dudley Mann, later along Confederate commissioner to
France, preceding Mr. Slidell.

Colonel Mann wished to work incognito. I was taken on as a kind of
go-between and, as I may say, figurehead, on the strength of being my
father's son and a very self-confident young gentleman, and began to get my
newspaper education in point of fact as a kind of fetch-and-carry for
Major Heiss. He was a practical newspaper man who had started the Union at
Nashville as well as the Union at Washington and the Crescent--maybe it was
the Delta--at New Orleans; and for the rudiments of newspaper work I could
scarcely have had a better teacher.