Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/121

 scoops during the Beriin Congress. Namely, about that worid-moving affair the 'London Times' for weeks could get no more or better news than, mayhap, the Brighton Enterprise. Finally de Blowitz, the Thunderer's international representative, lit upon a fourth-rate secretary in the German foreign office, who had an exceedingly broad appetite and a correspondingly narrow pocketbook. De Blowitz offered to pay for the secretary's luncheons, provided the young gentleman would exchange hats with him daily, the Berliner's chapeau concealing certain notes about goings on at the foreign office under the hat band. Agreed! By this ruse de Blowitz gathered the whole Berlin treaty piecemeal and was able to cable it from Brussels to London even before that famous document was read in the Congress."

Mark continued: "If Bismarck had been the ordinary small-minded statesman, he would have got on to de Blowitz's game before it was half finished, but being a gentleman, he saw nothing out of the way in the association of 'The Times' correspondent with one of his secretaries."

Mark was genuinely proud of Bismarck's partiality for his books, even if it came late in the day.

"Do you know," he once said, "that I gave Charles Darwin the strength to write some of his most famous and epoch-making volumes? How? I am told that, when the great scientist was utterly fagged out with study, 117