Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

enterprise, I asked the Times correspondent who the
lofty gentleman ahead might be.
"Oh That's Tom Cook," was the answer. "Amos
Cummings's best man on The Sun. lie's from Frisco.
If Tom wasn't out to interview every pall-bearer, he'd
be sitting with the driver."
I think that in my provincial ignorance I had not heard
till then of The Sun newspaper. At any rate, I had not
beheld it functioning. It was my first impression; and
from the point of view of the organ of Harvard University
and Beacon Hill the sight was not delectable.
III
John Boyle O'Reilly has a statue among the elect in
Boston's outdoor hall of fame, like Charles Sumner and
Edward Everett Hale and the dozens of others that the
city has deemed worthy of such commemoration. It is
a portrait bust on a shaft, with allegorical figures at the
base, the beautiful work of Dan Chester French. It was
paid for by popular subscription and dedicated with imposing ceremony.
When I first knew O'Reilly he scarcely could have
dreamed that bronze in public was to be his destiny.
There have been few careers more romantic than his;
that is, careers of men devoted to literature. The story is
well known. In Ireland he was condemned to be shot for
revolutionary activities of a desperate character. The
death sentence commuted, he spent months in Dartmoor
and other English prisons and was then transported to
Australia, and consigned to a region so unhealthy that
it promised the indirect execution of the original doom.
When he was excepted in 1869 from the general amnesty

to the Fenian prisoner-exiles, O'Reilly escaped and with
almost incredible exertions and privations made his way
through bush and desert to the west coast of Australia,
where he took possession of a rowboat and boldly put to