Two incidents stand out still in the mind, one creditably pleasing to vanity; the other, exactly the reverse. The latter, though it annoyed Muldoon keenly at the moment, fortunately for me appealed to his sense of humour too. He had given me an evening off--that is, all I had to do was to write a brief report of a Students’ Concert in which his little niece was performing. “Without straining veracity,” he mentioned with a grin, “ye might perhaps say something kind and pretty about her!” He winked, whispering her name in my ear. “Have ye got it?” he asked fiercely. I nodded. Was I thinking of something else at the moment? Was my mind in the woods that lovely evening in spring? At the concert I picked out the name I remembered and wrote later a sturdy eulogistic notice of an atrocious performer, saying the very prettiest and nicest things I could think of, then went home to a coveted early bed. But Muldoon’s grim smile next day, as I reported at his desk for an assignment, gave me warning that something was wrong. He did not keep me in suspense. I had selected for my praise, not only the crudest performer of the concert--that I already knew--but one whom all the other pupils disliked intensely, and whose name they particularly hoped would be omitted altogether. The niece I had not even mentioned. The other incident that stands out after all these years was more creditable. Dr. Lyman Abbott, Editor of the _Outlook_, which once Henry Ward Beecher edited as the _Church Union_, was preaching in Beecher’s Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, a series of sermons on “The Theology of an Evolutionist,” and Muldoon had persuaded the editor-in-chief that a full report on the front page every Monday would be a credit to the paper. His proposal was agreed to, apparently without too much enthusiasm. The Irishman was determined to justify it. “I want ye to take it on,” said Muldoon to me. “Ye can write shorthand. Make it 150.” A column was 100. To have a column and a-half on the front page, if I could do it well, would be a feather in my cap. But my shorthand was poor, I was out of practice too, bad notes are impossible to read for transcription, and mistakes would mean angry letters of correction from Dr. Abbott, probably. Monday was my day off. I went to Plymouth Church with a new notebook and three soft lead pencils, duly sharpened at both ends. In the brief interval before Sunday I practised hard. The church was packed to the roof, as I sneaked up the aisle--an unfamiliar place, I felt it!--to a little table placed immediately beneath the pulpit. I came in after the service, but just in time for the sermon. There were no other reporters present. It thrilled me to see Dr. Abbott, who, as a young man of twenty-three, had heard Lincoln speak on slavery.