I have referred to the fact that Lord Stanley came every day at noon to overlook what we had done. I would ask for nothing more amusing than to have heard his gossip at the Residency upon the manner in which he found THE FRIEND to be conducted and produced. The truth was that we had finished everything for the day, except the interminable proof-reading, by the time he reached what the country editor grandiloquently refers to as "our sanctum sanctorum." In consequence he always caught us just as we were looking up from our desks and taking a deep breath of relief.
We who have been bred in this profession may not realise just what applause is to an actor, or what there may be to a mariner in the movement and breath of the ocean; but we fully realise that journalism is perhaps the only calling that men find as full of fun as it is of hard work. The company of bright minds, certain to be sanguine and optimistic, the excitement produced by unexpected news, the rush to prepare it most attractively and against time, the thousand unpublishable conceits and views and arguments that leap to the mind and are discussed in council, the freaks and blunders of the reporters and contributors--all these elements are in the cup of joy that a journalist drinks off every day.
Therefore when Lord Stanley came he was certain to find us merry and voluble and prankish. He may have imagined that we must perforce be grave--we to whom was given the high and almost religious right to speak for an empire and an army, and to conduct a British organ in so delicate a situation as was ours among the Boers--neither offending them nor giving them a chance to find a flaw in the practice of our principles. Grave enough was that part of our work which we meant to be so.
Serious in its strain upon us and important in its effort to rest and inform and recreate the soldiers, was most of what we did. But it is a habit of the journalist's mind and a result of his work that he shall be or become a philosopher, viewing the world as it is, no matter how differently he may present it to a duller and more conservative public.
Therefore Lord Stanley found us declaiming soldier poetry, writing nonsense verses, drawing caricatures of one another, telling stories, behaving like men without a care on their minds. We realised that he must be shocked at us--and we voted that he behaved very well under the circumstances. He usually came in with a quick step and an air of business. We delayed him with chaff which he seemed always at a loss to understand at first. He got at our bundles of proof-sheets and he applied himself to them most gravely. By and by he began to catch the contagion of our spirits, his eye wandered from the sheets, he wavered--he began to join in our talk. "Is there anything else--or anything you are in doubt about?" he would ask. He believed us when we answered him, for he knew that we understood what not to publish. In that mutual trust and confidence there grew up a relation between us and himself which was dearly prized by us, and which we hope he esteemed as highly.