It was not
so long since that I could have forgotten. I bit a mark in the
Mulberry Bend, too, as my professional engagements took me that
way, promising myself that the day should come when I would have
time to attend to it. For the rest, if I had an hour to spare, I
put it in at the telegraph instrument. I had still the notion that
it might not be labor lost. And though I never had professional
use for it, it did come handy to me as a reporter more than once.
There is scarcely anything one can learn that will not sooner or
later be useful to a newspaper man, if he is himself of the kind
that wants to be useful.
Along in the spring some politicians in South Brooklyn who had started
a weekly newspaper to boom their own fortunes found themselves in
need of a reporter, and were told of a "young Dutchman" who might
make things go. I was that "Dutchman." They offered me $15 a week,
and on May, 20, 1874, I carried my grip across the river, and, all
unconscious that I was on the turning tide in my fortunes, cast
in my lot with "Beecher's crowd," as the boys in the office said
derisively when I left them.
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