the paper had thrived consumingly. It had thrived
so consumingly that after a little I was able to achieve the wish of my
heart and to go to London, taking my wife and my "great American novel"
with me. I have related elsewhere what came of this and what happened to
me.

III

That bread cast upon the waters--"'dough' put out at usance," as Joseph
Jefferson used to phrase it--shall return after many days has been
I dare say discovered by most persons who have perpetrated acts of
kindness, conscious or unconscious. There was a poor, broken-down
English actor with a passion for Chaucer, whom I was wont to encounter
in the Library of Congress. His voice was quite gone. Now and again I
had him join me in a square meal. Once in a while I paid his room rent.
I was loath to leave him when the break came in 1861, though he declared
he had "expectations," and made sure he would not starve.

I was passing through Regent Street in London, when a smart brougham
drove up to the curb and a wheezy voice called after me. It was my old
friend, Newton. His "expectations" had not failed him, he had come into
a property and was living in affluence.

He knew London as only a Bohemian native and to the manner born could
know it. His sense of bygone obligation knew no bounds. Between him and
John Mahoney and Artemus Ward I was made at home in what might be called
the mysteries and eccentricities of differing phases of life in the
British metropolis not commonly accessible to the foreign casual. In
many after visits this familiar knowledge has served me well. But Newton
did not live to know of some good fortune that came to me and to feel
my gratitude to him, as dear old John Mahoney did. When I was next in
London he was gone.

It was not, however, the actor, Newton, whom I had in mind in offering
a bread-upon-the-water moral, but a certain John Hatcher, the memory of
whom in my case illustrates it much better. He was a wit and a poet. He
had been State Librarian of Tennessee. Nothing could keep him out of
the service, though he was a sad cripple and wholly unequal to its
requirements. He fell ill. I had the opportunity to care for him. When
the war was over his old friend, George D. Prentice, called him to
Louisville to take an editorial place on the Journal.

About the same time Mr. Walter Haldeman returned from the South and
resumed the suspended publication of the Louisville Courier. He was in
the prime of life, a man of sur