Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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As the story is told to us by an eye-witness, the colonel met the brawling coward in Wall Street, took him by the throat, and with a cowhide striped the human parody from head to foot. For the space of nearly twenty minutes, as we are told, did the right arm of the colonel ply his weapon with unremitted activity, at which time the bystanders, who evidently enjoyed the scene mightily, interceded in behalf of the suffering, supplicating wretch, and Webb suffered him to run.

Had it been a dog, or any other decent animal, or had the colonel himself with a pair of good long tongs removed a polecat from his office, we know not that we would have been so much surprised; but that he could, by any possibility, have so far descended from himself as to come in public contact with the veriest reptile that ever defiled the paths of decency, we could not have believed.

Webb’s quarrel with Bennett grew out of the Herald’s financial articles. Bennett was the first newspaperman to see the news value of Wall Street. When he was a writer on the Courier and Enquirer, and one of Webb’s most useful men, he made a study of stocks, not as a speculator, but as an investigator. He had a taste for money matters. In 1824, five years after his arrival in America from the land of his birth, Scotland, he tried to establish a commercial school in New York and to lecture on political economy. He could not make a go of it, and so returned to newspaper work as reporter, paragrapher, and poet.