The next evening Mr. Proctor turned the mistake to a good “scoring” account, by stating that he fancied at first an error had been made; but that shortly afterwards, he remembered that the tradition was, that all good Americans go to Paris when they die, so that the reporter clearly understood his business.
The enterprising correspondent who sows his telegrams broadcast is a frequent cause of the appearance of mistakes. I recollect that one sent a hundred words over the wire regarding some village concert, the great success of which was due to the zeal of the Reverend John Jones, “the locus standi of the parish.” He had probably heard something at one time of a pastor loci, and made a brave but unsuccessful attempt to reproduce the phrase.
Another correspondent telegraphed regarding the arrival of two American cyclists at Queenstown, that their itinerary would be as follows: “They will travel on their bicycles through Ireland and England, and then crossing from Dover to Calais they will proceed through Europe, and from Turkey they will pass through Asia Minor into Xenophon and the Anabasis, leaving which they will travel to Egypt and the Land of Goschen.”
The reference to Xenophon was funny enough, but the spelling of the last word, identifying the country with the statesman, seemed to me to represent the highwater mark of the flood-tide of modernism. A few years before, when the correspondent was doubtless more in touch with the vicissitudes of the Children of Israel than with the feats of cyclists from the United States, he would probably have assimilated Mr. Goschen’s name with the Land of Goshen; but soon the fame of the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer had become of more immediate importance to him, and it was the land that changed its name in his mind to the name of the ex-Finance Minister.
It was probably the influence of the same spirit of modernism that caused a foreman, in making up the paper for the press, to insert under the title of “Sporting,” half a column of a report of a lecture by a clergyman on “The Races of Palestine.”
It was, however, the telegraph office that I found to be responsible for a singular error in the report of the arrest of a certain notorious criminal. The report should have stated that “a photograph of the prisoner had been taken by the detective camera,” but the result of the filtration of the message through a network of telegraph wires was the statement that the photograph “had been taken by Detective Cameron.”
Some years ago a too earnest naturalist was drowned when canoeing on a lake in the west of Ireland. An enterprising correspondent who clearly resided near the scene of the accident, forwarded to the newspaper with which I was connected, a circumstantial account of the finding of the capsized canoe. In the course of his references to the objects of the naturalist’s visit to the west, the reporter made the astounding statement that “he had already succeeded in getting together a practically complete collection of the flora and fauna of Ireland,”—truly a “large order.”