Exploits of an Irish Reporter
For enterprise, facility of invention and expedient, and the ability to “get there” in spite of every difficulty and obstacle, the American newspaper man is a century ahead of his European brother; but I know of one Irish knight of the stylograph who could give even a Yankee points, if we are to believe his friends.
Brian has been known to take notes in a rain-storm with a sharp-pointed scissors on the ribs of his umbrella.
When his leg was broken in a boiler explosion, he chronicled the event on the bandages.
When he had to disguise himself as a bandsman at an Orange demonstration, he took down the chairman’s speech in the mouth of his trombone.
He sent a graphic account of an Arctic expedition engraven on blocks of ice from Smith’s Sound, and he once pencilled the story of a railway collision on the wooden leg of a survivor. He forgot to mention how the mangled victim was accommodated with an artificial limb so soon after the disaster, but he never bothers his head about such minor details.
But his greatest phonographic achievement was in Central Africa a few years ago. King Mtesa, the dusky potentate discovered by Stanley, picked up from his European guests, among other accomplishments, the art of making speeches. It was a new, a delicious recreation to the savage soul. Twice a month he assembled his warriors, and held forth, and the ebon Secretary of State who failed to ejaculate the Central African substitute for “hear, hear,” at the proper moment, was served up for luncheon on the conclusion of the speech.
Brian heard of this. It became the one burning ambition of his soul to take a shorthand note of the Boston-baked-beans-color orator. He set out for Tanganyika to carry out his project. Accompanied by a dozen sons of night he penetrated the African jungle, swam its turgid rivers, evaded its hungry tribes, escaped its fierce animals, and after weeks of adventure and suffering, with his faithful followers, reached the king’s kraal the evening before one of that monarch’s speeches.
He had been scalped, had all his teeth drawn, lost a few toes, been once half boiled, and on another occasion baked nearly to a sweet and toothsome brown; still he had survived.
But, alas! he had lost his pencil and note-book, and these indispensable adjuncts of caligraphic civilization were unknown in Mtesa’s territory since Stanley had left.
Our reporter, however, had an inventive intellect not to be thwarted by such trifling obstacles. He hunted up a chalk ridge, and when the Cicero in jet addressed his subjects, Brian planted his Zanzibari attendants on their hands and knees, and took the speech in chalk upon their naked backs.
Mtesa, in return for the promise of a copy of the paper containing the speech, furnished the stenographer and his animated note-books with an escort to the coast, and triumph would have crowned Brian’s effort but for the most striking passages of the oration being lost through one of the blacks sitting down on a wet bank before he had been transcribed!