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I have no doubt they told it of Foster, as they did also of Hays. And Colonel Hays doubtless repeated it to you as the intimate gossip about Foster. "I have an article written by Colonel Hays and published in and cut from The Courier-Journal some twelve years after the composer's death, in which he sketches the life and work of Stephen Collins Foster.
The story, however, that Graves was so much affected that thereafter he could never sleep in a darkened chamber had no foundation whatever, a fact I learned from my associate in the old Louisville Journal and later in The Courier-Journal, Mr. Isham Henderson, who was a brother-in-law of Mr. Graves, his sister, Mrs. Graves, being still alive. The duello died at length.
It was said rather in jest than in earnest; but I was prepared to lend him the money. The next thing I knew, and without asking for a dollar, he had opened The Brunswick. In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into day, and during a dozen years I took my twelve o'clock supper there.
Truth to say, it was not a pleased surprise, because, as it flared before the eye of the startled citizen in big Gothic letters, The Courier-Journal, there issued thence an aggressive self-confidence which affronted the amour propre of the sleepy villagers. They were used to a very different style of newspaper approach. Nor was the absence of a timorous demeanor its only offense.
In next day's Commercial, blazing under vivid headlines, these leading editorials, dated "Chicago" and "New York," "Springfield, Mass.," and "Louisville, Ky.," appeared with the explaining line "The Tribune of to-morrow morning will say " "The Courier-Journal and the Republican will say to-morrow morning " Wondrous consensus of public opinion! The Davis boom went down before it.
Several days after that Malcolm found the tramp's picture in the Courier-Journal. He was a noted criminal who had escaped from a Northern penitentiary some two months before, and had been arrested by the Louisville police. There was no mistaking him. That big, ugly scar branded him on cheek and forehead like another Cain.
Watterson the Courier-Journal, and Mr. Murat Halstead the Cincinnati Commercial, though, of course, like them, he tacitly hid himself behind the sacred and inviolable screen of anonymity, and none of them exercised greater power over the affairs of the nation than he, out of the centre, did from that charming New England town to which he invited me.
Without mentioning how it had reached me, I put the proposition to him. "Certainly," he said, "it is true." The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I had heard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I added a closing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to imply that I had not gone quite daft.
During those evil days the Courier-Journal stood alone, having no party or organized following. At length it was joined on the Northern side by Greeley. Then Schurz raised his mighty voice. Then came the great liberal movement of 1871-72, with its brilliant but ill-starred campaign and its tragic finale; and then there set in what, for a season, seemed the deluge.
There were two daughters of this marriage, nieces of the President, and when they were visiting the White House we had shall I dare write it? high jinks with our nigger-minstrel concerts on the sly. Will S. Hays, the rival of Foster as a song writer and one of my reporters on the Courier-Journal, told me this story: "Foster," said he, "was a good deal of what you might call a barroom loafer.
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