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

HOW I WENT TO "THE SUN"

103

this enlarged to $25, but the petitioner was gently but
firmly informed that it would not do, inasmuch as he
would then be receiving as much as Mr. Pidgin. Most
assuredly it would not have done. Mr. Pidgin was the
worthy cashier down-stairs; he spent his days in keeping
the budget balanced, and his evenings in awaiting the
glory of a delinquent night-blooming c(ereus he possessed.
Among the interesting people in Lewiston at that time
were William Pierce Frye, then representative in Congress
and afterward for many years senator from Maine, and
Doctor Alonzo Garcelon, one of the finest of those oldschool country practitioners who would drive twenty miles
through a snow-storm on call to treat a felon on a farmer's
wife's thumb, or perform with equal sang-froid the most
difficult of amputations with jack-knife and carpenter's
saw if no better surgical instruments were at hand at the
exigent moment. A circle of us, including Mr. Frye's
junior partners, used to play euchre in his law office while
the future senator sat straddling a chair till well after
midnight telling us story after story; and no better raconteur ever existed. Doctor Garcelon, also, was more or
less in politics as a Democrat; he was elected governor
in 1879 by the Legislature at the time of the Greenback
uprising in Maine, and he stood firm as a rock during that
period of intense excitement. I have a singular memory of
going down from New York in the days of Solon Chase to
get the views of the Maine Council, composed exclusively
of the upsetters. I reached the State capital by a late
train and was planning an orderly series of visits the next
morning; but, no, there came a knock at the door at about
one o'clock and there filed into the small bedroom in the
Augusta House a procession of six statesmen, some in

unconventional attire, some only partly dressed and evidently just from their pillows. "You mought be on
Danna's paper?" said the leader. Assent. "Well, we are
the Governor's Council." Two of them occupied the only