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

THE DOOR TO THE COMPOSING-ROOM

71

match to the manuscript. For a moment the perpetual
candidate resembled a plate in Fox's " Book of Martyrs ";
but without the slightest change of expression he trampled
out the flaming Vocabulary Laboratory and went on
calmly in some such fashion as this:
"Gentlemen, I have come up through great tribulation.
I am in possession of a vast profundity of knowledge on
the sciences of the universe, that when written out and
published will be worth thousands of millions of dollars
to our nation. God has favored me physically and mentally
from my birth. The time has come for the industrial and
educational sciences to be represented at the head of the
American Government. And I have been speaking over
twenty-five years on different subjects, almost without
pay. I have spoken thousands of times without one cent
or a crumb of bread or a place to lay my head. I have
also spoken over a hundred times since last June from New
York City to Toledo, Ohio, and all the presidents of the
railroads have paid me was one dollar and a half. Man is
the architect of his own weal. My circular entitled 'The
Pratt Intellectual Zenith' is progressing."
Poor old Daniel Pratt! It was no fault of his that he
never reached the White House. How many perpetual
candidates have been more sincere? And I am able to
contribute to political history and to the credit of his disinterested patriotism what I believe to be the unpublished
fact that in 1868 he voluntarily stepped aside in favor of
Grant and Colfax.
Every professor and instructor in the Bowdoin I then
knew has departed this world, the last to go being that
noble character and eminent botanist George Lincoln
Goodale. With Cyrus Fogg Brackett, afterward distin

guished at Princeton, he taught me the little I ever
learned of the natural and physical sciences. The letter
is still cherished which Doctor Goodale wrote me awhile
before he went to Harvard to become later the successor