"
He adopted the first two of these suggestions. John A. Cockerill was still
under contract with Joseph Pulitzer and could not accept for a year or
more. He finally did accept and died in the Bennett service. John Russell
Young took the editorial page and was making it "hum" when a most
unaccountable thing happened. I was amazed to receive an invitation to a
dinner he had tendered and was about to give to the quondam Virginian and
just elected New York Justice Roger A. Pryor. "Is Young gone mad," I said
to myself, "or can he have forgotten that the one man of all the world whom
the House of Bennett can never forget, or forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?"
The Bennett-Pry or quarrel had been a _cause celebre_ when John Young
was night editor of the Philadelphia Press and I was one of its Washington
correspondents. Nothing so virulent had ever passed between an editor and a
Congressman. In one of his speeches Pryor had actually gone the length of
rudely referring to Mrs. James Gordon Bennett.
The dinner was duly given. But it ended John's connection with the Herald
and his friendly relations with the owner of the Herald. The incident might
be cited as among "The Curiosities of Journalism," if ever a book with that
title is written. John's "break" was so bad that I never had the heart to
ask him how he could have perpetrated it.
III
The making of an editor is a complex affair. Poets and painters are said to
be born. Editors and orators are made.
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