After a while I began to find that there was much more money to be made outside the _Cyclopaedia_ than in it. William H. Hurlbut, whom I had once seen so nearly shot, had been the "foreign editor" of the _New York Times_. Mr. Henry Raymond, its proprietor, had engaged a Mr. Hammond to come after some six months to take his place, and I was asked to fill it _ad interim_. I did so, so much to Mr. Raymond's satisfaction, that he much regretted when I left that he had not previously engaged me. He was always very kind to me. He said that now and then, whenever he wanted a really superior art criticism, I should write it. He was quite right, for there were not many reporters in New York who had received such an education in aesthetics as mine. When Patti made her _debut_ in opera for the first time, I was the only writer who boldly predicted that she would achieve the highest lyrical honours or become a "star" of the first magnitude. Apropos of Hurlbut, I heard many years after, in England, that a certain well-known _litterateur_, who was not one of his admirers, having seen him seated in close _tete-a-tete_ with a very notorious and unpopular character, remarked regretfully, "Just to think that with one pistol-bullet _both_ might have been settled!" Hurlbut was, even as a boy, very handsome, with a pale face and black eyes, and extremely clever, being _facile princeps_, the head of every class, and extensively read. But there was "a screw loose" somewhere in him. He was subject, but not very frequently, to such fits of passion or rage, that he literally became blind while they lasted. I saw him one day in one of these throw his arms about and stamp on the ground, as if unable to behold any one. I once heard a young lady in New York profess unbounded admiration for him, because "he looked so charmingly like the devil." For many years the _New York Herald_ always described him as the Reverend Mephistopheles Hurlbut. There was another very beautiful lady who afterwards died a strange and violent death, as also a friend of mine, an editor in _New_ York, both of whom narrated to me at very great length "a grotesque Iliad of the wild career" of this remarkable man. It never rains but it pours. Frank Leslie, who had been with me on Barnum's _Illustrated News_, was now publishing half-a-dozen periodicals and newspapers, and offered me a fair price to give him my mornings. I did so. Unfortunately, my work was not specified, and he retained his old editors, who naturally enough did not want me, although they treated me civilly enough. One of these was Thomas Powell, who had seen a great deal of all the great English writers of the last generation. But there was much rather shady, shaky Bohemianism about the frequenters of our sanctum, and, all things considered, it was a pity that I ever entered it.