I felt
that, instead of my host's amusement having been produced by his
peculiar introduction, he had made his eccentric address merely as an
excuse to chuckle over some notion which had formed itself in his mind
from material entirely foreign to his immediate surroundings.
I mention this because I found later that one of Mr. Pulitzer's most
embarrassing peculiarities was the sudden revelation from time to time
of a mental state entirely at odds with the occupation of the moment. In
the middle of an account of a play, when I was doing my best to
reproduce some scene from memory, with appropriate changes of voice to
represent the different characters, Mr. Pulitzer would suddenly break
in, "Did we ever get a reply to that letter about Laurier's speech on
reciprocity? No? Well, all right, go on, go on."
Or it might be when I was reading from the daily papers an account of a
murder or a railroad wreck that Mr. Pulitzer would break out into a peal
of his peculiar chuckling laughter. I would immediately stop reading,
when he would pat me on the arm, and say, "Go on, boy, go on, don't mind
me. I wasn't laughing at you. I was thinking of something else. What was
it? Oh, a railroad wreck, well, don't stop, go on reading."
As soon as we were seated Mr.
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