Mr. Young had ordered for that evening a magnificent dinner for his staff, to which mine was invited to celebrate his unquestioned feat. While waiting for the dinner to come on, he took me apart and asked confidentially what we had really done. I told him, and he asked if we cabled, to which I replied that as to that I knew nothing, that I had wired G.W. Smalley in London, but what he had done I could not say. "Well," said he, "if you have cabled you have beaten us, and if you have not cabled you may have beaten us," and then he went on to say that if I would drop the "Tribune" and come over to the "Herald" he would give me a good post and good pay. "No," I replied, "I have taken service with the 'Tribune' for the campaign, and I cannot desert them." (My recompense was a curt dismissal from the "Tribune" as soon as the urgent work of the reporting of the opening was done.) Mr. Whitelaw Reid's nerve had failed him when it came to the question of the expense of cabling, and the 6000 words had gone by steamer from Queenstown. I had given the "Tribune" the best beat it had ever had except the Sedan report, if the editor had had the courage to profit by it. The "Herald" received 150 words of its report in time for the press the next morning, and had to make up its page of dispatches from matter sent by post in advance and by expansion of the 150 words received. Edmund Yates, in his autobiography, tells a story of the affair which is in every important detail untrue, and he probably knew nothing of it except what Young had admitted, and that was certainly very little, for Young was a very reticent man, and not likely to tell his defeat even to his staff. Bennett was too fickle and whimsical an employer to suit me, and I had no disposition to expose myself to his whims. With Young I was always on the best terms, and he was disposed to employ me when a momentary service was required, but I had had one experience with his chief, which was sufficient. He had offered me the London agency of the "Herald" at a time when any constant occupation would have been acceptable, and we had come to terms, when suddenly he was taken with the notion that Edmund Yates, in addition to the service to the paper, would be of use to him in social ways, and he dropped me and appointed Yates, to drop him a little later, paying him a year's salary to break the contract.