This year I was fearfully busy. As I had taken the dramatic criticism in hand, for which alone we had always employed a man, I went during twelve months 140 times to the opera, and every evening to several theatres, _et cetera_. Once I was caught beautifully. There had been an opera bouffe, the "Grande Duchesse" or something, running for two or three weeks, and I had written a criticism on it. This was laid over by "press of matter," but as the same play was announced for the next night with the same performers, we published the critique. But it so chanced that the opera by some accident was not played! The _Evening Bulletin_, my old paper, rallied me keenly on this blunder, and I felt badly. John Forney, jun., however, said it was mere rubbish of no consequence. He was such an arrant Bohemian and hardened son of the press, that he regarded it rather as a joke and a feather in our caps, indicating that we were a bounding lot, and not tied down to close observances. Truly this is a very fine spirit of freedom, but it may be carried too far, as I think it was by a friend of mine, who had but one principle in life, and that was _never_ to write his newspaper correspondence in the place from which it was dated. It came to pass that about three weeks after this retribution overtook the _Bulletin_, for it also published a review of an opera which was not sung, but I meanly passed the occurrence by without comment. When a man hits you, it is far more generous, manly, and fraternal to hit him back a good blow than to degrade him by silent contempt. The Presidential campaign between Grant and Johnson was beginning to warm up. Colonel Forney was in a cyclone of hard work between Washington, Pennsylvania, and New York, carrying on a thousand plots and finely or coarsely drawn intrigues, raising immense sums, speaking in public, and, not to put it too finely, buying or trading votes in a thousand tortuous or "mud-turtlesome and possum-like ways"--for _non possumus_ was not in his Latin. Never shall I forget the disgust and indignation with which the great Republican champion entered the office one evening, and, flinging himself on a chair, declared that votes in New Jersey had gone up to sixty dollars a head! And I was forced to admit that sixty dollars for a Jerseyman did seem to be an exorbitant price. So he went forth on the war-path with fresh paint and a sharp tomahawk. It often happened to me in his absence to have very curious and critical decisions in my power. One of these is the "reading in" or "reading out" of a man from his party. This is invariably done by a leading political newspaper. I remember, for instance, a man who had been very prominent in politics, and gone over to the Democrats, imploring me to readmit him to the fold; but, as I regarded him as a mere office-hunter, I refused to do it. _Excommunicatus sit_!