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

VAGARIES OF THE IMAGINATION

427

quake and fire, broke into my locked room and occupied
it all night, sending forth to the printers column after
column of that unique compound of memory and genius
which became a classic under the title "The City That
Was"; Isabel Hapgood, translator of Turgueniev, of De
Amicis, of Palacio-Vald6s, of Victor Hugo, and whose
command of Russian, Italian, Spanish, and French was
almost as perfect as that of the language in which she
carried on for years with learning and gumption the bookreviewing done by Hazeltine before her; Montgomery
Schuyler, who came to us from the Timcs, bringing his
fine perceptions of the esthetic in architecture and English prose; Albert Gardner Robinson, historian of the
intervention in Cuba and of old New England doorways;
Logan Grant McPherson, political economist, railway
expert, and yet man of poetic imagination; Miles Menander Dawson, poet also, though philosopher and actuary;
William Elliot Griffis, who knows Japan.
And here is John Hay, confiding freely and frankly from
Washington his intentions to keep the door open in China;
and, singularly enough, at about the same time Wellington Koo, afterward to be diplomat, foreign minister, and
premier, but then plain John Wellington Koo, a freshman
or sophomore in Nicholas Murray Butler's big school,
favoring the paper frequently with his views on the state
of the nations.
Admirals, urging the Sea Power doctrine: letter after
letter from Mahan, conveying to me articles for The Su i
on the subject or discussing them, or acknowledging the
honorarium; Bradley Allen Fiske, in his time not less urgent philosophically, while much more objective in technical specifications; George Dewey, saying of a certain edi

torial article about him, "I have already placed it among
my most cherished papers for safe keeping"; at least a
dozen long and earnest missives from another American
Admiral, after the Lusitania incident but before our entry