[CHAPTER IV.]
'Tis my vocation, Hal; 'tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.
King Henry IV.
The city was measurably quiet, but arrests, and examinations of suspected Abolitionists, were frequent. In general, I felt little personal disquietude, except the fear of encountering some one who knew my antecedents; but about once a week something transpired to make me thoroughly uncomfortable for the moment.
Preparing and Transmitting Correspondence.
I attended daily the Louisiana Convention, sitting among the spectators. I could take no notes, but relied altogether upon memory. In corresponding, I endeavored to cover my tracks as far as possible. Before leaving Cincinnati, I had encountered a friend just from New Orleans, and induced him to write for me one or two letters, dated in the latter city. They were copied, with some changes of style, and published. Hence investigation would have shown that The Tribune writer began two or three weeks before I reached the city, and thrown a serious obstacle in the way of identifying him.
My dispatches, transmitted sometimes by mail, sometimes by express, were addressed alternately to half a dozen banking and commercial firms in New York, who at once forwarded them to The Tribune editorial rooms. They were written like ordinary business letters, treating of trade and monetary affairs, and containing drafts upon supposititious persons, quite princely in amount. I never learned, however, that they appreciably enlarged the exchequer of their recipients. Indeed, they were a good deal like the voluminous epistles which Mr. Toots, in his school-boy days, was in the habit of writing to himself.
Guarding Letters against Scrutiny.
I used a system of cipher, by which all phrases between certain private marks were to be exactly reversed in printing. Thus, if I characterized any one as "patriot and an honest man," inclosing the sentence in brackets, it was to be rendered a "demagogue and a scoundrel." All matter between certain other marks was to be omitted. If a paragraph commenced at the very edge of a sheet, it was to be printed precisely as it stood. But beginning it half across the page indicated that it contained something to be translated by the cipher.