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

TIE GOLDEN SPIKE AND MANY JOURNEYS 401
around the Mysian Mount Olympus, through Jenisher,
an ancient capital of the Osmanli invaders before Brusa
was conquered in 1326, across the country now lately
fought over by the Turks and Greeks, to Bilejik and the
Angora railway; passing, as we traversed the vilayet,
village after village which the Turkish driver would identify by a grim census-two, three, or four hundred Armenians killed there last week or the week before last;
sojourning in khans that had never registered a pleasure
tourist; held up by soldier sentinels at the hill posts, who
questioned us suspiciously but gave us sedimentary coffee
from long-handled brass utensils; beset by government
spies who were puzzled by our presence unpossessed of a
teskere or Turkish passport-and all this without the
sense or experience of any real adventure except such as
would be of interest only to an entomologist.
The unconscious tendency to magnify foreign adventures reminds me of an American consul at Stuttgart
with whom I once came home on a steamer. He was a
serious person, a lawyer from a Middle Western State.
The consul told me he had weathered many crises requiring
difficult and delicate diplomacy on his part; one in particular. "What was that?" I asked. "It was the case," he
replied, with perfect gravity, "of an American child
whom the police wanted to arrest for snowballing the
ex-King of Wiirttemberg."
On one occasion, however, I did experience something
of the thrill of the unexpected. It was in the interior Cuban
city of Camagtiey, formerly Puerto Principe. In a quarter
of that town I stumbled upon a modest little square, or

rather triangle, designated on the lamp-posts as "Plaza
Charles A. Dana." On the wall of the church of Las
Mercedes, at one corner of the plaza was the marble tablet
inscribed as shown on the next page.
The editor of The Sun had been the warm friend of Jos6
Marti and the constant ally of the successive generations