“Go up-stairs and try your hand,” said he—“we’ll soon see what you’ll amount to, I reckon. We don’t want any references here. We take a man as we find him. Guess I’ll give you twenty-five dollars a week, anyhow, for one week sartain; and then, if we suit each other, we can raise the pile bimeby. Say, are you on?”
I “guessed” I was “on;” and, went up-stairs to the paste-and-scissors purlieus with much gusto.
It was a very good commencement for me—I who had nothing to bless myself with before, for, the salary would pay my board and lodging twice over. It was a beginning, at any rate; and, as we subsequently did “suit each other,” my down-east friend behaved very fairly, keeping to his promise of “raising my pile”—a synonym for increasing the weekly sum of “greenbacks” he allowed me for my labours. I had never any reason to repent the bargain—nor did I.
The work I had to do was by no means arduous, although, in many respects, of a novel character. From the fact that my residence in America had not been yet sufficiently extended to enable me to master the ins and outs of Transatlantic politics, the leading articles—or “editorials” as they are there styled—which I had to write were but few in number, and entirely referring to social subjects of local interest; notwithstanding that I was occasionally allowed to enlighten the Manhattan mind in the matter of European affairs. If my special “editor’s” duties were thus light, I made up, however, for their deficiency, by enlarging upon the skeleton telegrams that came every night across the ocean—“expanding news,” so to speak—and by also writing, on the arrival of every steamer, while seated in the back parlour of the journal’s office in New York, the most graphic special correspondent’s letters from Paris and London!
With regard to the telegrams. Half a dozen words only might come over the cable, to say, for instance, that the late Emperor Napoleon, who was the then supposed arbiter of the Old World, had nominated Count somebody or General that to a fresh portfolio; or that, the “scion of the house of Hapsburgh” was suffering from tooth-ache; or that, John Bright was going to Dublin to lecture “on Irish affairs.”
My duties were such, that, when these telegrams appeared, in all the glories of print, the next morning, they had grown in such a miraculous way, that they took up half a yard of room, instead of but a few lines of type. Had you read them, you would have found their contents thoroughly explanatory, entering into the most minute details—as to how Napoleon’s change of ministers would affect “the situation;” how poor Francis Joseph’s attack of caries might, could and would raise again the ghost of “the Eastern question;” how the advent of the great Radical leader in Ireland would be the signal for a general Fenian uprising—and, so on.
I only mention these cases in point, to describe the way in which I clothed my skeletons with solid substrata of flesh and blood. The public, you see, had only so much the more information for their money—which was, probably, just as reliable as if it had been really “wired” under the Atlantic! Nobody was the wiser; nobody, the sufferer by the deception; so, what was “the odds” so long as they were correspondingly “happy”—in their ignorance?
My correspondent’s letters were much more mendacious compositions.
I am quite ashamed to tell you what long columns of flagrant description I was in the habit of reeling off—touching certain races in the Bois de Boulogne, soirees at the Tuileries, and working-men’s “demonstrations” in Hyde Park—of which I was only an imaginative spectator!
I used to rake up all my old reminiscences of the boulevards and cafés and prados, giving details concerning the “petit-crèvés” and “cocottes,” the “flaneurs” and “grandes dames” of the once “gay” capital—gay no longer; and, interspersing them with veracious reports respecting the latest hidden thoughts of “Badinguet,” and vivid descriptions of the respective toilets of the Empress Eugenie, Baroness de B—, Madame la Comtesse C—, la belle Marquise d’E—, and all the other fashionable letters of the alphabet—chronicling the very latest achievements in “Robes en train” and “Costumes à ravir” of the great artist Worth. Even the men folk of America—“shoddy” of course—dote on those accounts of European toilets, which we never see given in any of our papers, excepting where the appearance of the Queen’s Drawing-Room may be passingly noted; or, when the Morning Post exhausts itself over a “marriage in high life.”