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

THE GOLDEN SPIKE AND MANY JOURNEYS 423
his "Chronicle of Friendships," relates how he attempted
to tell it in 1886 at the dinner-table at Stevenson's house
in the Rue Vernier in Paris, and was sent to the bench for
not telling it "in a proper manner," that is to say, for dodging or blurring the profanities. "Louis declared," wrote
Low, "that it was positively the best American story that
he had ever heard; but that the man who would maim its
fair proportions, as I was about to do, was quite unfit for
publication."
The last letter I ever had from Theodore Roosevelt
related to the Nantucket Whaling Yarn. He preferred a
longer version, with more detail and conversation injected; and, although he was chafing terribly at the time
over the failure of the Administration to prepare for a
coming war, he entered with characteristic zest into a
controversy over this little subject. I tried him with the
orthodox text. He wrote, all in his own still boyish hand:
Oyster Bay, Long Island, N. Y.
Nov. 30, 1916.
DEAR MR. MITCHELL: I return the interesting clipping.
There are of course all kinds of variants. The one that filled
my soul with the most perfect content is more elaborate than
Hopkinson Smith's (and what a trump Hopkinson Smith was!);
the first dialogue between the thrusting mate and the reluctant
captain is longer; the mate's appeal in successive sentences is
cumulative, "thar she blows!-and breaches!-and belches!and sperm at that!" The captain's successive negations increase in geometric progression in force until he finally yields,
running: "Mr. Jones, I've already told you I didn't see fitten
for to lower —I've already told you four times-I've already
told you more'n sixteen times."

Faithfully yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
"My beloved brother's letter is so deliciously like him,"
his sister Corinne, Mrs. Douglas Robinson, remarked to
me after Colonel Roosevelt's death at the beginning of