His aunt caught the boy’s hand, and danced with him out of the room. Rachel, the little girl, a wondrous miniature of Zillah, clung to her father, and the whole family trooped off to wash their hands before the meal.
CHAPTER VI.
AN INTERESTING TALK.
“The Courier” was now an established fact. As a newspaper it was as much a revelation to the journalists as to the general public. London had taken to it from the first moment of its issue. The provinces, instead of following their usual course of waiting to see what London did, took their own initiative, and adopted the new paper at once. Every instinct about the ideal paper, felt and nursed during the waiting years by Tom Hammond, had been true instinct. He had always felt them to be true; now he realized the fact. He was a proud man, a happy man.
One curious feature of the new journal had attracted much attention, even before the publication of the first issue. In his “Foreword,” as he had termed it, in a full page announcement that appeared in three of the leading London dailies, Tom Hammond had said:
“An important feature of the ‘Courier’ will be the item or items (as the case may be) which will be found each day under the heading, ‘From the Prophet’s Chamber.’ A greater man than the editor of ‘The Courier’ once said, ‘Every editor of a newspaper ought to have a strain of the seer in his composition. He ought to have the gift of prophecy up to a certain point. He ought to be so thoroughly conversant with the history of his own and every other nation that when history is on the point of repeating itself—as it has a habit of doing,—he may not be caught altogether napping.’ It is the unexpected that happens, we say.
“True, but there are many of the so-called happenings of the unexpected that to the spirit of the seer will have been expected and more than half-prophesied.
“Now, while we propose that the whole tone of ‘The Courier’ shall show the spirit of the seer in a measure, we shall endeavour to make the particular column to which we are now alluding essentially new. In it we shall deal with every class of subject likely to prove mentally arrestive to our readers, and shall make it prophetic up to the limits of our capacities as man, citizen and editor. How far the possession of the quality of the seer will be found in us we must leave the future—and our readers—to decide. But we certainly anticipate that ‘The Prophet’s Chamber’ column will be one of the most popular features of what we shall aim to make the most popular paper of the day.”
Tom Hammond was no believer in luck. He had left nothing to chance in the production of his paper. There was not a department left to subordinates which he did not personally assure himself was being carried out on the best, the safest, lines. For weeks he literally lived on the spot where his great paper was to be produced, taking his meals and sleeping at an hotel close by the huge building that housed “The Courier.”
He saw very little of Sir Archibald Carlyon during these weeks, and nothing at all of George, or the fair American, Madge Finisterre. George was in Scotland; Madge on the Continent.