It was then that I began to nurse some ambitions of my own. I was going to be a great man of letters. I was going to write histories and dramas and romances and poetry. But as I had set up for myself I felt in honor bound meanwhile to earn my own living. III I take it that the early steps of every man to get a footing may be of interest when fairly told. I sought work in New York with indifferent success. Mr. Raymond of the Times, hearing me play the piano at which from childhood I had received careful instruction, gave me a job as "musical critic" during the absence of Mr. Seymour, the regular critic. I must have done my work acceptably, since I was not fired. It included a report of the debut of my boy-and-girl companion, Adelina Patti, when she made her first appearance in opera at the Academy of Music. But, as the saying is, I did not "catch on." There might be a more promising opening in Washington, and thither I repaired. The Daily States had been established there by John P. Heiss, who with Thomas Ritchie had years before established the Washington Union. Roger A. Pryor was its nominal editor. But he soon took himself home to his beloved Virginia and came to Congress, and the editorial writing on the States was being done by Col. A. Dudley Mann, later along Confederate commissioner to France, preceding Mr. Slidell. Colonel Mann wished to work incognito. I was taken on as a kind of go-between and, as I may say, figurehead, on the strength of being my father's son and a very self-confident young gentleman, and began to get my newspaper education in point of fact as a kind of fetch-and-carry for Major Heiss. He was a practical newspaper man who had started the Union at Nashville as well as the Union at Washington and the Crescent--maybe it was the Delta--at New Orleans; and for the rudiments of newspaper work I could scarcely have had a better teacher. Back of Colonel Mann as a leader writer on the States was a remarkable woman. She was Mrs. Jane Casneau, the wife of Gen. George Casneau, of Texas, who had a claim before Congress. Though she was unknown to fame, Thomas A. Benton used to say that she had more to do with making and ending the Mexican War than anybody else. Somewhere in the early thirties she had gone with her newly wedded husband, an adventurous Yankee by the name of Storm, to the Rio Grande and started a settlement they called Eagle Pass. Storm died, the Texas outbreak began, and the young widow was driven back to San Antonio, where she met and married Casneau, one of Houston's lieutenants, like herself a New Yorker. She was sent by Polk with Pillow and Trist to the City of Mexico and actually wrote the final treaty. It was she who dubbed William Walker "the little gray-eyed man of destiny," and put the nickname "Old Fuss and Feathers" on General Scott, whom she heartily disliked.