.......
In the evening, I dined with the members of the New England Club, who meet every month to listen, at dessert, to some interesting debate or lecture. The wine is supplied by bets. You bet, for instance, that the sun will shine on the following Friday at half-past two. If you lose, you are one of those who will have to supply one, two, or three bottles of champagne at the next dinner, and so on. This evening the lecture, or rather the short address, was given by Colonel Charles H. Taylor on the history of American journalism. I was particularly interested to hear the history of the foundation of the New York Herald, by James Gordon Bennett, and that of the New York World, by Mr. Pulitzer, a Hungarian emigrant, who, some years ago, arrived in the States, unable to speak English, became jack-of-all-trades, then a reporter on a German paper, proprietor of a Western paper, and then bought the World, which is now one of the best paying concerns in the whole of the United States. This man, who, to maintain himself, not in health, but just alive, is obliged to be constantly traveling, directs the paper by telegraph from Australia, from Japan, from London, or wherever he happens to be. It is nothing short of marvelous.
.......
I finished the evening in the St. Botolph Club, and I may say that I have to-day spent one of the most delightful days of my life, with those charming and highly cultured Bostonians, who, a New York witty friend of mine declares, “are educated beyond their intellects.”
[1] J. B. O’Reilly died in 1890.
