Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/55

 lightest phrase have so long been urged that men might well go about with their fingers on their lips, oracular as presidential candidates, deliberating each thought before giving it wing. And yet, as Carlyle said of French speech, the immeasurable tide flows on and ebbs only toward the small hours of the morning. Though even then in certain quarters, the tide does not ebb, and in those hours truths are sometimes spoken—for instance, by newspaper reporters, who, their night's work done, turn to each other for relaxation and speak those thoughts they have not dared to write in their chronicles of the day that is done. The thought itself is only a vagrant, encountered along the way back to such an evening, when a reporter uttered two little words that acquired for me a profound significance.

"Oh, nothing." Those were the exact words, just those two, and yet a negative so simple contained within itself such an affirmation of an awful truth, that I have never been able to forget them, though for a time I tried. Charlie R and I had gone one night, after the paper had gone to press, into a little restaurant in Chicago to get some supper. It was some time in the year 1891, and, in our idle gossip, the hanging of the anarchists, then an event so recent that the reporters now and then spoke of it, had come up in our talk.

"Where were you when that occurred?" he asked.

"In Toledo," I answered.

"What did people think of it there?"

"Of the hanging?"

"Yes."