Just about five years ago five members of the editorial staff of this paper were gathered together in the library.  Blaine had just been nominated for the presidency by the National Republican Convention.  For months the Daily News had advocated the renomination of Arthur, but now within an hour it beheld its teachings go for naught, its ambitions swept ruthlessly away, and its hopes cruelly, irrevivably crushed; Mr. Stone was then editor of the paper; he was in the convention hall when Blaine’s nomination was secured.  His editorial associates waited with serious agitation his return, and his instructions as to the course which the paper would pursue in the emergency which had been presented.  There were different opinions as to what Mr. Stone would be likely to do, but there was a general feeling that he would be likely to antagonize Blaine.  One of the editorial writers, a Canadian, who had just taken out his last naturalization papers, expressed determination that the paper must fight Blaine.  He hated Blaine, and he had reason to; for Blaine had, during his short career as prime minister, evinced a strong disposition to clutch all Canadians who were caught fishing for tomcod in American waters.  Therefore, Carthage delenda est.

The debate ran high, yet every word was spoken softly, for the most violent excitement always precipitates a hush.  Even the newsboys in the alley caught the awful infection; they stole in and out noiselessly and with less violence than usual, as if, in sooth, the dumb wheels reverenced the dismal sanctity of the hour.  The elevator crept silently down with the five o’clock forms, so decently and so composedly as scarcely to jar the bottle of green ink on the Austin landholder’s table.  All at once the door opened and in stalked M.E.  Stone, silent, pallid, protentous.  His wan eye comprehended the scene instantaneously, but no twitch or tremor in his lavender lips betrayed the emotions (whatever they might have been) that surged beneath the clothes he wore.

Cervantes tells how that Don Quixote, in the course of one of his memorable adventures, was shown a talking head—­a head set upon a table and capable of uttering human speech, but in so hollow and tube-like a tone as to give one the impression that the voice came from far away.  A somewhat similar device is now exhibited in our museums, where, upon payment of a trifling fee, you may hear the head discourse in a voice which sounds as though it might emanate from the tomb and from the very time of the first Pharaoh.

Mr. Stone looked and Mr. Stone spoke like a “talking head” when he came in upon us that awful day.  His face had the inhuman pallor, his eyes the lack-lustre expression, and his tones the distant, hollow, metallic cadence of the inexplicable machine that astounds the patrons of dime-museums.  He seemed to take in the situation at once; knew as surely as though he had been told what we were talking