Away back in 1873, after a dinner, Mr. Blaine took me into his den and told me that it was no longer a surmise but a fact that the group about General Grant, who had just been reflected by an overwhelming majority, was maneuvering for a third term. To me this was startling, incredible. Returning to my hotel I saw a light still burning in the room of Senator Morton, of Indiana, and rapping at the door I was bidden to enter. Without mentioning how it had reached me, I put the proposition to him. "Certainly," he said, "it is true."
The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I had heard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I added a closing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to imply that I had not gone quite daft.
"These things," I wrote, "may sound queer to the ear of the country. They may have visited me in my dreams; they may, indeed, have come to me betwixt the sherry and the champagne, but nevertheless I do aver that they are buzzing about here in the minds of many very serious and not unimportant persons."
Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated and ridiculed as I, never a simple news gatherer so discredited. Democratic and Republican newspapers vied with one another which could say crossest things and laugh loudest. One sentence especially caught the newspaper risibilities of the time, and it was many a year before the phrase "between the sherry and the champagne" ceased to pursue me. That any patriotic American, twice elevated to the presidency, could want a third term, could have the hardihood to seek one was inconceivable. My letter was an insult to General Grant and proof of my own lack of intelligence and restraint. They lammed me, laughed at me, good and strong. On each successive occasion of recurrence I have encountered the same criticism.
Chapter the Twenty-Third
The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and Religious Belief
I
The journalist and the player have some things in common. Each turns night into day. I have known rather intimately all the eminent English-speaking actors of my time from Henry Irving and Charles Wyndham to Edwin Booth and Joseph Jefferson, from Charlotte Cushman to Helena Modjeska. No people are quite so interesting as stage people.
During nearly fifty years my life and the life of Joseph Jefferson ran close upon parallel lines. He was eleven years my senior; but after the desultory acquaintance of a man and a boy we came together under circumstances which obliterated the disparity of age and established between us a lasting bond of affection. His wife, Margaret, had died, and he was passing through Washington with the little brood of children she had left him.
It made the saddest spectacle I had ever seen. As I recall it after more than sixty years, the scene of silent grief, of unutterable helplessness, has still a haunting power over me, the oldest lad not eight years of age, the youngest a girl baby in arms, the young father aghast before the sudden tragedy which had come upon him. There must have been something in my sympathy which drew him toward me, for on his return a few months later he sought me out and we fell into the easy intercourse of established relations.