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

A NEW ENGLAND EDUCATION

7

articles that attempted to identify the Indian missionary
Eleazer Williams with the lost Bourbon prince who might
have been Louis XVII but for well-known historical
events. This sensational discussion, referred to by Major
Putnam in his memoir of his father, had for me at the
time an interest almost personal, inasmuch as there was
a stoutly maintained tradition in our family, originating
in I know not what process of genealogical research or
impulse of royalist yearning, that the Reverend Eleazer
was a distant relative of ours.
Up in the attic, besides the barrelled Ledgers of Robert
Bonner and the Porter's Spirit of the Times, reposed no
end of numbers of Yankee Notions and Nick-Nax and
Vanity Fair, the last-named supreme in its field-all carefully bundled and ready for release whenever the hunger
for mirth became urgent. I was too young, of course,'
ever to have known Artemus Ward, that is to say,
Charles Farrar Browne, either in our native State of
Maine or in New York when he edited Vanity Fair; one
of his artist associates, Henry L. Stephens, whose foxes
and geese and other animals reached the highest grade
of humorous delineation, I did come to know slightly
about 1875. But of Artemus Don Seitz has left little
to be said that is really interesting.
Finally, on top of the bureau in the spare room of the
house that has been spoken of, there stood, or rather lay
in sequestered dignity, the two big volumes of Josephus's
"History of the Jewish War," with sumptuous martial
and architectural engravings, and a ponderous family
Bible, strangely enough of no assured Sabbath status,
since it included between the Old Testament and the New
the books of the Apocrypha, sought by us children with

purely secular eagerness on account of Tobit and the Fish.
May I be forgiven the partial catalogue of these ancient
companions? They were of my earliest and best-loved
friends.