and admirable. Whatever the merits or demerits of mine were—and it was years ere I ever gave them a thought—the public, which is always eager for something new, took to them at once.
I say that for years I never gave them a thought. All of the principal poems except the “Barty” and “Breitmann as a Politician,” were merely written to fill up letters to C. A. Bristed, of New York, and I kept no copies of them—in fact, utterly forgot them. Weingeist was first written in a letter to a sister of Captain Colton, with the remark that it was easier to write such a ballad than any prose. But Bristed published them à mon insu in a sporting paper. Years after I learned that I published one called “Breitmann’s Sermon” in Leslie’s Magazine. This I have never recovered. If I write so much about these poems now, I certainly was not vain of them when written. The public found them out long before I did, and it is not very often that it gets ahead of a poet in appreciating his own works.
However, I was “awful busy” in those days. I had hardly begun on the Press ere I found that it had a weekly paper, made up from the daily type transferred, which only just paid its expenses. Secondly, I discovered that there was not a soul on the staff except myself who had had any experience of weekly full editing. I at once made out a schedule, showing that by collecting and grouping agricultural and industrial items, putting in two or three columns of original matter, and bringing in a story to go through the daily first, the weekly could be vastly improved at very little expense.
Colonel Forney admired the scheme, but asked “who was to carry it out.” I replied that I would. He remonstrated, very kindly, urging that I had all I could do as it was. I answered, “Colonel Forney, this is not a matter of time, but method. There is always time for the man who knows how to lay it out.” So I got up a very nice paper. But for a very long time I could not get an agent to solicit advertisements
who knew the business. The weekly paid its expenses and nothing more. But one day there came to me a young man named M. T. Wolf. He was of Pennsylvania German stock. He had lost a small fortune in the patent medicine business and wanted employment badly. I suggested that, until something else could be found, he should try his hand at collecting “advers.”
Now, be it observed, as Mozart was born to music, and some men have a powerful instinct to study medicine, and others are so unnatural as to take to mathematics, Wolf had a grand undeveloped genius beyond all belief for collecting advertisements. He had tried many pursuits and failed, but the first week he went into this business he brought in $200 (£40), which gave him forty dollars, and he never afterwards fell below it, but often rose above. “Advers.” for him meant not adversity. It was very characteristic of Colonel Forney, who was too much absorbed in politics to attend much to business, that long after the Weekly Press was yielding him $10,000 a year clear profit, he said to me one day, “Mr. Leland, you must not be discouraged as to the weekly; the clerks tell me in the office that it meets its expenses!”
There was abundance of life and incident on the newspaper in those days, especially during election times in the autumn. I have known fights, night after night, to be going on in the street below, at the corner of Seventh and Chestnut, between Republicans and Democrats, with revolver shots and flashes at the rate of fifty to a second, when I was literally so occupied with pressing telegrams that I could not look out to see the fun. One night, however, when there were death-shots falling thick and fast, I saw a young man make a most incredible leap. He had received a bullet under the shoulder, and when a man or a deer is hit there he always leaps. I heard afterwards that he recovered, though this is a vital place.
It happened once that for a week the Republicans were kept from resisting or retaliating by their leaders, until the
Democrats began to disgrace themselves by excesses. Then all at once the Republicans boiled over, thrashed their foes, and attacking the Copperhead clubs, threw their furniture out of the window, and—inadvertently perhaps—also a few Copperheads. Just before they let their angry passions rise in this fashion there came one night a delegation to serenade Colonel Forney at the office. The Colonel was grand on such occasions. He was a fine, tall, portly man, with a lion-like mien and a powerful voice. He began—
“My friends, fellow-citizens and Republicans, you have this week acted nobly.”