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

MEDDLINGS WITH THE OCCULT

183

were mordant in politics in the days of Blame. Incidentally there would sometimes appear with Wales a modest
boy caricaturist, one Fred Opper, whose little people in
black and white have been charged for nearly fifty years
with perhaps more real laughing humor than the creatures
of any other artist of his kind; and he is at it yet, though
I have never seen him since. There was Bob Johnson, a
young importer of drugs, who spent laborious days and
nights in perfecting a ready-made mustard plaster, and
afterward became the head of one of the foremost pharmaceutical concerns in the world; I shall have to speak of
Johnson again when we go to Europe together for the
first time, in 1878. Now and then Louis F. Post sat in,
beaming benignantly through his spectacles as he talked
primitive socialism and single tax and emptied mug after
mug, either at some table on the Hoboken Heights or at
the nearer repository of malt refreshment which was
styled "Mr. Push's" because of the sign upon the swinging door.
Last, but by no means least, was our great Cragg, tallest
and handsomest of the lot, a Baltimorean and cosmopolitan equally at home on Fifth Avenue and the Boulevard des Capucines, the chief patron of old Moretti's, at
the Sign of the Pasta, Fourteenth Street and Third
Avenue, up-stairs. Externally, in dignity and suavity of
manner Cragg might have been the first secretary of an
important embassy or legation; in his inwards he was like
a big-hearted, clumsy boy of twelve or fourteen. His
main occupation was to be plaintiff in a lawsuit that involved a considerable inheritance. His counsel were the
members of one of the most eminent law firms in New

York. I never understood the case, and Cragg never
understood it himself; but in order to comprehend its
legal aspects he decided to take a course under Professor
Theodore Dwight of the Columbia Law School. It was
characteristic of Cragg that he should attend the lectures