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

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

men was at a dinner of the old Fellowcraft Club, away
back in 1888. The insecurity with which he sometimes
spoke when on his legs in public made him seem to refer
to his somewhat unpleasant Bartley Hubbard in "A
Moder Instance" as a type of the profession to some of
the representatives of which he was then addressing his
remarks. But that hiatus of tact was manifestly unconscious and therefore unintended. Of the other letters
mentioned, here is one:
November 14, 1912.
DEAR MR. MITCHELL: Since I came home I have met many
another Spanish traveller and they have all been of your mind
and mine about the Spaniards: simply, they love them. How
do we have such an infernally wrong idea of them? It long antedates the beneficiaries of our Monroe doctrine. And what a
lot of good books there are about Spain. I shrink from adding
to the number. Yours sincerely, W.D. HowahB.
While recalling some of the novelists who used to help
from outside to make The Sun readable it would be a real
sin to overlook those who actually nested there. For a
long time the city rooms of both the morning and evening
editions were somewhat of a preparatory school for writers
of fiction. Among those who were thus graduated, upstairs or down, into book-cover literature were Richard
Harding Davis, whom I remember as the youth who artistically composed and was accustomed dismally to
render his dirge-like music for Kipling's "They're Hanging Danny Deever in the Morning"; Lawrence Perry,
David Graham Phillips, Jesse Lynch Williams, Samuel
Hopkins Adams, that clever girl Dana Gatlin, and Edward

W. Townsend, who created "Chimmie Fadden," went to
Congress, and wrote "Fort Birkett" and other capital
tales. All of these were Sun reporters, and good reporters
too. James Luby, whose novel "The Black Cross Clove,"
fastened itself on me when I read it, because of its skilful