ought 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.

Back of Colonel Mann as a leader writer on the States was a remarkable
woman. She was Mrs. Jane Casneau, the wife of Gen. George Casneau, of
Texas, who had a claim before Congress. Though she was unknown to fame,
Thomas A. Benton used to say that she had more to do with making and
ending the Mexican War than anybody else.

Somewhere in the early thirties she had gone with her newly wedded
husband, an adventurous Yankee by the name of Storm, to the Rio Grande
and started a settlement they called Eagle Pass. Storm died, the Texas
outbreak began, and the young widow was driven back to San Antonio,
where she met and married Casneau, one of Houston's lieutenants, like
herself a New Yorker. She was sent by Polk with Pillow and Trist to
the City of Mexico and actually wrote the final treaty. It was she who
dubbed William Walker "the little gray-eyed man of destiny," and put
the nickname "Old Fuss and Feathers" on General