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

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

Spencer and does not understand the meaning of difficult
words, Herbert Spencer assents eagerly to the most
farcical propositions submitted to him.
I never myself found a single case where the reply or
the volunteered communication was not limited by the
possible knowledge or manifest intelligence of the mundane intellect supervening. And hearsay or secondhand evidence I was never prepared to accept from any
source, however respectable.
IV
A bank president who was also the president of one of
the railroads later absorbed by the Pennsylvania system
wrote privately to The Sun in 1881 that his house in
Philadelphia was the scene of nightly occurrences far
transcending in importance and convincing quality anything that was said to have been produced at Chittenden
or elsewhere. I gladly accepted an invitation to be a witness.
This gentleman shall be called Mr. Kent for the excellent reason that Kent was not his name. His home was
one of the demurely aristocratic mansions in the neighborhood of Rittenhouse Square. Even the front portal
bespoke affluence and tranquillity. Personally Mr. Kent
was of a type by no means so uncommon as might be
supposed: in the affairs of this world a hard-headed man
of business, conservative, cautious in gauging human
character and financial proposals, a capitalist-contractor
whose presence on any board of direction would be deemed
a guarantee of prudent management; yet spending nearly
half his life in another strange world where banjos played

and bells rung without human hands, where ghostly arms
were stretched forth from behind curtains, and dim
forms belonging to every age of history met him face to
face-all this, at least, to his honest and eager belief.
Mr. Kent told me that he devoted from $10,000 to