in South
Carolina--sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of John H. Pleasants
and one of the sons of Thomas Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed, and
the yet more celebrated affair between Graves, of Kentucky, and Cilley,
of Maine, in which Cilley was killed; Bladensburg the scene, and the
refusal of Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the occasion.

I once had an intimate account of this duel with all the cruel incidents
from Henry A. Wise, a party to it, and a blood-curdling narrative it
made. They fought with rifles at thirty paces, and Cilley fell on the
third fire. It did much to discredit duelling in the South. The story,
however, that Graves was so much affected that thereafter he could never
sleep in a darkened chamber had no foundation whatever, a fact I
learned from my associate in the old Louisville Journal and later in The
Courier-Journal, Mr. Isham Henderson, who was a brother-in-law of Mr.
Graves, his sister, Mrs. Graves, being still alive. The duello died at
length. There was never sufficient reason for its being. It was both a
vanity and a fad. In Hopkinson Smith's "Col. Carter of Cartersville,"
its real character is hit off to the life.

II

When very early, rather too early, I found myself in the saddle, Bennett
and Greeley and Raymond in New York, and Medill and Storey in Chicago,
were yet alive and conspicuous figures in the newspaper life of the
time. John Bigelow, who had retired from the New York Evening Post,
was Minister to France. Halstead was coming on, but, except as a
correspondent, Whitelaw Reid had not "arrived." The like was true of
"Joe" McCullagh, who, in the same character, divided the newspaper
reading attention of the country with George Alfred Townsend and Donn
Piatt. Joseph Medill was withdrawing from the Chicago Tribune in favor
of Horace White, presently to return and die in harness--a man of
sterling intellect and character--and Wilbur F. Storey, his local rival,
who was beginning to show signs of the mental malady that, developed
into monomania, ultimately ended his life in gloom and despair, wrecking
one of the finest newspaper properties outside of New York. William R.
Nelson, who was to establish a really great newspaper in Kansas City,
was still a citizen of Ft. Wayne.

James Gordon Bennett, the elder, seemed then to me, and has always
seemed, the real founder of the modern newspaper as a vehicle of popular
information, and, in point of apprehension, at leas