Gresham had a way of seizing on any bizarre incident reported in the morning papers, enfolding it in “funny language,” adding a pun, and thus making it his own. He had a cunning mastery of periphrasis, and a telling command of adverbs.
Here is an illustration. An account was given one morning by the Central news of the breaking into of a house at Johnsonville (Mich.) by a negro, who had stolen a quantity of greenbacks. The thief, escaping across some fields, was attacked by a cow, which, after severely injuring the negro, ate the greenbacks.
Gresham’s unacknowledged version of the episode ran as follows:
“The sleepy god had got the stranglehold on John Denville when Caesar Bones, a coloured gentleman, entered John’s house at Johnsonville (Mich.) about midnight. Did the nocturnal caller disturb his slumbering host? No. Caesar Bones has the finer feelings. But as he was noiselessly retiring, what did he see? Why, a pile of greenbacks which John had thoughtlessly put away in a fire-proof safe.”
To prevent the story being cut out by the editor, who revised all the proofs of the column, with the words “too long” scribbled against it, Gresham continued his tale in another paragraph.
“‘Dis am berry insecure,’ murmured the visitor to himself, transplanting the notes in a neighbourly way into his pocket. Mark the sequel. The noble Caesar met, on his homeward path, an irritable cudster. The encounter was brief. Caesar went weak in the second round, and took the count in the third. Elated by her triumph, and hungry from her exertions, the horned quadruped nosed the wad of paper money and daringly devoured it. Caesar has told the court that if he is convicted of felony, he will arraign the owner of the ostrich-like bovine on a charge of receiving stolen goods. The owner merely ejaculates ‘Black male!’”
On his day Gresham could write the column and have a hundred lines over by ten o’clock. I, too, found plenty of copy as a rule, though I continued my practice of doing a few paragraphs overnight. But every now and then fearful days would come, when the papers were empty of material for our purposes, and when two out of every half-dozen paragraphs which we did succeed in hammering out were returned deleted on the editor’s proof.
The tension at these times used to be acute. The head printer would send up a relay of small and grubby boys to remind us that “On Your Way” was fifty lines short. At ten o’clock he would come in person, and be plaintive.
Gresham, the old hand, applied to such occasions desperate remedies. He would manufacture out of even the most pointless item of news two paragraphs by adding to his first the words, “This reminds us of Mr. Punch’s famous story.” He would then go through the bound volumes of Punch—we had about a dozen in the room—with lightning speed until he chanced upon a more or less appropriate tag.
Those were mornings when verses would be padded out from three stanzas to five, Gresham turning them out under fifteen minutes. He had a wonderful facility for verse.