ors. To him we stole, with humiliated faces, and begged a
trifling advance of salary. He sternly requested us not to encroach
behind the counter--his own indisputable domain--but sometimes asked us
to watch the office while he drank with a theatrical agent at the
nearest bar. He was an inveterate gossip, and endowed with a damnable
love of slipshod argument; the only oral censor upon our compositions,
he hailed us with all the complaints made at his solicitation by
irascible subscribers, and stood in awe of the cashier only, who
frequently, to our delight and surprise, combed him over, and drove him
to us for sympathy.

The foreman was still our power behind the throne; he left out our copy
on mechanical grounds, and put it in for our modesty and sophistry. In
his broad, hot room, all flaring with gas, he stood at a flat stone like
a surgeon, and took forms to pieces and dissected huge columns of
pregnant metal, and paid off the hands with fabulous amounts of
uncurrent bank bills. His wife and he went thrice a year on excursions
to the sea-side, and he was forever borrowing a dollar from somebody to
treat the lender and himself.

The ship-news man could be seen towards the small-hours, writing his
highly imaginative department, which showed how the Sally Ann, Master
Todd, arrived leaky in Bombay harbor; and there were stacks of newsboys
asleep on the boilers, fighting in their dreams for the possession of a
fragment of a many-cornered blanket.

These, like myself, went into the halcyon land of Nod to the music of a
crashing press, and swarmed about it at the dawn like so many gad flies
about an ox, to carry into the awakening city the rhetoric and the
rubbish I had written.

And still they go, and still the great press toils along, and still am I
its slave and keeper, who sit here by the proud, free sea, and feel like
Sinbad, that to a terrible old man I have sold my youth, my convictions,
my love, my life!

CHAPTER II.

THE WAR CORRESPONDENT'S FIRST DAY.

Looking back over the four years of the war, and noting how indurated I
have at last become, both in body and in emotion, I recall with a sigh
that first morning of my correspondentship when I set out so
light-hearted and yet so anxious. It was in 1861. I was accompanied to
the War department by an _attache_ of the United States Senate. The new
Secretary, Mr. Edwin M. Stanton, referred me to a Mr. Sanford, "Military
Supervisor of Army Intelligence," a