"I don't know much about such things," Loring answered. "You see, at the time of the Mexican War and of all my Indian campaigns, the newspapers hadn't yet invented the war correspondent. Then in the Confederacy everybody was a soldier, as you know, and the war correspondents carried muskets and answered to roll calls. Their newspaper work was an avocation, not a vocation. You see I am learning English under your tuition."
This little jest referred to the fact that a few days before, in running through the manuscript of a lecture he was preparing, I had changed the word "avocation" to "vocation," explaining to him the difference in meaning.
[Sidenote: Concerning War Correspondents]
"Then in Egypt we were not much troubled with war correspondents--perhaps they had the bowstring and sack in mind--but I have an abiding grudge against another type of correspondent whom I encountered there. I mean the tourist who has made an arrangement with some newspaper to pay the expenses of his trip or a part of them in return for letters to be sent from the places visited. He is always an objectionable person, particularly when he happens to be a parson out of a job, and I always fought shy of him so far as possible, usually by turning him over to my dragoman, to be shown about and 'stuffed' as only a dragoman can 'stuff' anybody. You see the dragoman has learned that every Western tourist in the East is hungry for information of a startling sort, and the dragoman holds himself ready to furnish it without the smallest regard for truth or any respect at all for facts. On one occasion one of these scribbling tourists from England visited me. One of the Khedive's unoccupied palaces had been assigned to me for my headquarters, and I was exceedingly busy with preparations for a campaign then in contemplation. Stone Pacha and I were both up to our eyes in work, trying to mobilize an army that had no mobility in it. Accordingly I turned the tourist over to my dragoman with orders to show him everything and give him all the information he wanted.
"The palace was divided as usual. There was a public part and a part called the harem--which simply means the home or the family apartments. During my occupancy of the place that part of it was empty and closed, as I am a bachelor. But as the dragoman showed him about the tourist asked to see that part of the palace, whereupon the dragoman replied: