me the purchaser.

His career is another illustration of the saying that truth is stranger
than fiction.

II

Joseph Pulitzer and I came together familiarly at the Liberal Republican
Convention, which met at Cincinnati in 1872--the convocation of cranks,
as it was called--and nominated Horace Greeley for President. He was
a delegate from Missouri. Subsequent events threw us much together. He
began his English newspaper experience after a kind of apprenticeship on
a German daily with Stilson Hutchins, another interesting character of
those days. It was from Stilson Hutchins that I learned something of
Pulitzer's origin and beginnings, for he never spoke much of himself.

According to this story he was the offspring of a runaway marriage
between a subaltern officer in the Austrian service and a Hungarian lady
of noble birth. In some way he had got across the Atlantic, and being in
Boston, a wizened youth not speaking a word of English, he was spirited
on board a warship. Watching his chance of escape he leaped overboard
in the darkness of night, though it was the dead of winter, and swam
ashore. He was found unconscious on the beach by some charitable
persons, who cared for him. Thence he tramped it to St. Louis, where he
heard there was a German colony, and found work on a coal barge.

It was here that the journalistic instinct dawned upon him. He began to
carry river news items to the Westliche Post, which presently took him
on its staff of regular reporters.

The rest was easy. He learned to speak and write English, was
transferred to the paper of which Hutchins was the head, and before he
was five-and-twenty became a local figure.

When he turned up in New York with an offer to purchase the World we met
as old friends. During the interval between 1872 and 1883 we had had
a runabout in Europe and I was able to render him assistance in the
purchase proceeding he was having with Gould. When this was completed he
said to me: "You are at entire leisure; you are worse than that, you are
wasting your time about the clubs and watering places, doing no good
for yourself, or anybody else. I must first devote myself to the
reorganization of the business end of it. Here is a blank check. Fill it
for whatever amount you please and it will be honored. I want you to go
upstairs and organize my editorial force for me."

Indignantly I replied: "Go to the devil--you have not money
enough--there is not money enough in the