After a preliminary flourish I began to reel off the figures I had committed to memory the previous night.  Before I had got very far Mr. Pulitzer cried.

“Stop!  Are you reading those figures?”

“No,” I replied.  “I read them over last night in the Daily Telegraph.”

“My God!  Are you giving them from memory?  Haven’t you got a note of them in your hand?  Hasn’t he?  Hasn’t he? ...” appealing to the table.

Reassured on this point he said, “Well, go on, go on.  This interests me.”

As soon as I had finished he turned to Craven and said, “Go and get that paper, and find the article.”

When Craven returned with it, he continued, “Now, Mr. Ireland, go over those figures again; and you, Mr. Craven, check them off and see if they’re correct.  Now, play fair, no tricks!”

I had made two mistakes, which were reported as soon as they were spoken.  At the end Mr. Pulitzer said: 

“Well, you see, you hadn’t got them right, after all.  But that’s not so bad.  With a memory like that you might have known something by now if you’d only had the diligence to read.”

My second score was made just at the end of dinner, or rather when dinner had been finished some time and J. P. was lingering at table over his cigar.  The question of humor came up, and someone remarked how curious it was that one of the favorite amusements of the American humorist should be to make fun of the Englishman for his lack of humor—­ “Laugh, and all the world laughs with you, except the Englishman,” and so on.  The usual defenses were made—­Hood, Thackeray, Gilbert, Calverley, etc.—­and then Punch was referred to.

This gave me the chance of repeating, more or less accurately, a paragraph which appeared in Punch some years ago, and which I always recite when that delightful periodical is slandered in my hearing.  It ran something after this fashion: 

“One of our esteemed contemporaries is very much worked up in its mind about Mr. Balfour’s foreign policy, which it compares to that of the camel, which, when pursued, buries its head in the sand.  We quite agree with our esteemed contemporary about Mr. Balfour’s foreign policy, but we fear it is getting its metaphors mixed.  Surely it is not thinking of the camel which, when pursued, buries its head in the sand, but of the ostrich which, when pursued, runs its eye through a needle.”

It was a lucky hit.  No one had heard it before, and our party broke up with Mr. Pulitzer in high good humor.

So the days passed.  I saw a great deal of Mr. Pulitzer and went through many agonizing hours of cross-examination; but gradually matters came round to the point where we discussed the possibility of my becoming a member of his personal staff.  He thought that there was some hope that, if he put me through a rigorous training, I might suit him, but before it could even be settled that such an attempt should be made many things would have to be cleared up.