Campaigns of a Non-Combatant | Page 4

the dashing escort of the proprietor's
wife, who preferred his jaunty coat and highly-polished boots to the
less elaborate wardrobe of us writers. That this noble and fashionable
creature could descend to writing wrappers, and to waiting his turn with
a bank-book in the long train of a sordid teller, passed all speculation
and astonishment. He made a sorry fag of the office boy, and advised
us every day to beware of cutting the files, as if that were the one vice
of authors. 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 attaché of the United States Senate. The new
Secretary, Mr. Edwin M. Stanton, referred me to a Mr. Sanford,
"Military Supervisor of Army Intelligence," and after a brief delay I
was requested to sign a parole and duplicate, specifying my loyalty to
the Federal Government, and my promise to publish nothing

detrimental to its interests. I was then given a circular, which stated
explicitly the kind of news termed contraband, and also a printed pass,
filled in with my name, age, residence, and newspaper connection. The
latter enjoined upon all guards to pass me in and out of camps; and
authorized persons in Government employ to furnish me with
information.
Our Washington Superintendent sent me a beast, and in compliment to
what the animal might have been, called the same a horse. I wish to
protest, in this record, against any such misnomer. The creature
possessed no single equine element. Experience has satisfied me that
horses stand on four legs; the horse in question stood upon three.
Horses may either pace, trot, run, rack, or gallop; but mine made all the
five movements at once. I think I may call his gait an eccentric stumble.
That he had endurance I admit; for he survived perpetual beating; and
his beauty might have been apparent to an anatomist, but would be
scouted by the world at large. I asked, ruefully, if I was expected to go
into battle so mounted; but was peremptorily forbidden, as a valuable
property might be endangered thereby. I was assigned to the
Pennsylvania Reserve Corps in the anticipated advance, and my friend,
the attaché, accompanied me to its rendezvous at Hunter's Mills. We
started at two o'clock, and occupied an hour in passing the city limits. I
calculated that, advancing at the same ratio, we should arrive in camp
at noon next day. We