With Donn Piatt's permission I told that story several times. Presently I read it in brief form in a newspaper where the hero of it was set down as "Tom Platt." I suppose the reporter in that case confused the closely similar sounds of "Donn Piatt" and "Tom Platt." At any rate, it seems proper to say that the venerable ex-Senator from New York never practiced law in Ohio and never even unintentionally induced the burning of a church. The story was Donn Piatt's and the experience was his.
LXVI
First Acquaintance with Mr. Pulitzer
I first made Mr. Pulitzer's personal acquaintance in Paris, where he was living at that time. I had been at work on the World for a comparatively brief while, when he asked me to visit him there—an invitation which he several times afterwards repeated, each time with increased pleasure to me.
On the occasion of my first visit to him, he said to me one evening at dinner:
"I have invited you here with the primary purpose that you shall have a good time. But secondly, I want to see you as often as I can. We have luncheon at one o'clock, and dinner at seven-thirty. I wish you'd take luncheon and dinner with me as often as you can, consistently with my primary purpose that you shall have a good time. If you've anything else on hand that interests you more, you are not to come to luncheon or dinner, and I will understand. But if you haven't anything else on hand, I sincerely wish you'd come."
In all my experience—even in Virginia during the old, limitlessly hospitable plantation days—I think I never knew a hospitality superior to this—one that left the guest so free to come on the one hand and so entirely free to stay away without question if he preferred that. I, who have celebrated hospitality of the most gracious kind in romances of Virginia, where hospitality bore its most gorgeous blossoms and its richest fruitage, bear witness that I have known no such exemplar of that virtue in its perfect manifestation as Joseph Pulitzer.
Years afterwards, at Bar Harbor, I had been working with him night and day over editorial problems of consequence, and, as I sat looking on at a game of chess in which he was engaged one evening, he suddenly ordered me to bed.
"You've been overworking," he said. "You are to go to bed now, and you are not to get up till you feel like getting up—even if it is two days hence. Go, I tell you, and pay no heed to hours or anything else. You shall not be interrupted in your sleep."