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Some one in the crowd said:

“When is that duel to be fought?”

Norman Hansen came toward me, and held out his hand, with a great jolly laugh.

“We will never fight with the sword,” he said, “but only with the pen!”

We didn’t even fight with the pen, for he lost all faith in Cook, and sometimes from northern altitudes I get kind and generous messages from him.

W. T. Stead maintained his belief in Cook until the University of Copenhagen formally rejected Cook’s claim and canceled his honorary degree, when the evidence of his own papers, which afterward arrived, and the story of his own Eskimos, left no shred of doubt in his favor.

Then I had a note from the great old journalist.

“I have lost and you have won,” he wrote, and after that used generous words which I need not publish.

Truly it was a queer, exciting incident in my journalistic life, and looking back upon it, I marvel at my luck.

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By a young journalist, or an old one, there is always an adventure to be found in London, as in any great city of the world where the passions of men and women, the conflict of life, the heroism and crimes of human nature, its dreams, its madness, and its faith, are but thinly masked behind the commonplace aspect of modern streets, and beneath the drab cloak of dullness of modern civilization.