The most important piece of ghost writing I ever did came in the course of the Lincoln work—Charles A. Dana’s “Recollections of the Civil War.” Mr. Dana, at that time the active editor of the New York _Sun_, had had an exceptional war experience dating from 1862 to 1865 as assistant to Secretary Stanton. He had spent much time in the field; he had been with Grant at Vicksburg, with Rosecrans and Thomas at Chattanooga, again with Grant in the Peninsular Campaign. “The eyes of the government at the front,” Mr. Lincoln called him. No man in the administration had had better opportunity of judging Lincoln, particularly in relation to the conduct of the war, and none was a better judge of character. Could I get the whole story as far as it concerned Lincoln? I hesitated to ask it. The truth was, I was afraid of Mr. Dana. I knew him only on the editorial page of the New York _Sun_. He was too clever, too quick-witted, too malicious for me to get on with, I feared. They laughed at me at the office when I voiced my qualms. Nobody was held higher there than Charles A. Dana. He had been a customer of the McClure Syndicate from the beginning, and they believed in his professional integrity, admired his detestation and relentless pursuit of fakers, honored and tried to imitate his editorial motto, “If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.” “Why should you feel this way?” reproved Mr. Phillips. “Mr. Dana is a gentleman.” “Nonsense! I’ll take care of it for you,” said Mr. McClure, and he rushed to the _Sun_, office. He did fix it and more, for, returning, he told me with glee that Mr. Dana was willing to give his whole war story, that is if I would do the work and arrange some practical plan for the interviews. The first step, of course, was to find what Dana material, published and unpublished, was in the war records. The editing of the records then under way was in charge of J. Leslie Perry. Mr. Perry did not believe in women fussing with history, particularly with Civil War history. War was man’s business. “How can you understand it?” he shouted at me. However, I insisted on my rights, and nobody could have been more helpful when he considered a thing an obligation of his official position. To the end Mr. Perry’s chief satisfaction came when he caught me slipping. “That’s what comes from allowing a woman to write history,” he would say jubilantly. Between us we brought together a grist of Dana’s dispatches and reports. I crammed on the campaigns, and by appointment appeared at the end of Mr. Dana’s day, about four o’clock in the afternoon, for my first interview. His desk was stripped of everything that pertained to the newspaper, but held a row of the latest books, not only in English but in three or four other languages, as well as a copy of the _Cosmopolis_, an ambitious and rather pretentious review in three or four languages issued for a short time in the late nineties.