During the Civil War, when news was sufficiently exciting for the most ambitious journalist, they used to come to my church for a copy of my Sermons.  News in those days was pretty accurate, but it sometimes went wrong.

On a Sabbath night, at the close of a preaching service in Philadelphia, a reporter of one of the prominent newspapers came into my study adjoining the pulpit and asked of me a sketch of the sermon just delivered, as he had been sent to take it, but had been unavoidably detained.  His mind did not seem to be very clear, but I dictated to him about a column of my sermon.  He had during the afternoon or evening been attending a meeting of the Christian Commission for raising funds for the hospitals, and ex-Governor Pollock had been making a speech.  The reporter had that speech of the ex-Governor of Pennsylvania in his hand, and had the sketch of my sermon in the same bundle of reportorial notes.  He opened the door to depart and said, “Good evening,” and I responded, “Good evening.”  The way out from my study to the street was through a dark alley across which a pump handle projected to an unreasonable extent.  “Look out for that pump handle,” I said, “or you may get hurt.”  But the warning did not come soon enough.  I heard the collision and then a hard fall, and a rustle of papers, and a scramble, and then some words of objurgation at the sudden overthrow.

There was no portable light that I could take to his assistance.  Beside that, I was as much upset with cruel laughter as the reporter had been by the pump handle.  In this state of helplessness I shut the door.  But the next morning newspaper proved how utter had been the discomfiture and demoralisation of my journalistic friend.  He put my sermon under the name of ex-Governor Pollock at the meeting of the Christian Commission, and he made my discourse begin with the words, “When I was Governor of Pennsylvania.”

Never since John Gutenberg invented the art of printing was there such a riot of types or such mixing up of occasions.  Philadelphia went into a brown study as to what it all meant, and the more the people read of ex-Governor Pollock’s speech and of my sermon of the night before, the more they were stunned by the stroke of that pump handle.

But it was soon forgotten—­everything is.  The memory of man is poor.  All the talk about the country never forgetting those who fought for it is an untruth.  It does forget.  Picture how veterans of the war sometimes had to turn the hand-organs on the streets of Philadelphia to get a living for their families!  How ruthlessly many of them have been turned out of office that some bloat of a politician might take their place!  The fact is, there is not a man or woman under thirty years of age, who, born before the war, has any full appreciation of the four years martyrdom of 1861 to 1865, inclusive.  I can scarcely remember, and yet I still feel the pressure of domestic calamity that overshadowed the nation then.