Byline: Old News Is Good News

In its written form telegraphese, or "Morse," as it is called in the vernacular, is rarely seen. Yet as a vehicle of expression it is, to the initiated, as harmonious, subtle, and fascinating as the language of music itself.

As soon as the order to disband the volunteers had gone forth, the North had begun to ask itself what they were going to do with the million men about to inundate them.

Great numbers of them had gone into the army boys and had been made men by danger and suffering.

The disbanded army faced their hard situation like the brave men they were, and joined patiently in one of the gravest tasks in the history of the world—the Reconstruction of the South.

The worst of the ordeal of these men, who had begun to disband in this haphazard way, was not getting home, it was what they found when they got there.

Here was I, under sentence, after a farce of a trial wherein I was denied not only my right of trial by jury, but my right to plead guilty or not guilty.

I am now in a precarious position, riding the ends of the down-curving roofs of two cars at the same time. With a quick, tense movement I transfer both legs to the curve of one roof and both hands to the curve of the other roof

I have often thought that to this training of my tramp days is due much of my success as a story-writer. In order to get the food whereby I lived, I was compelled to tell tales that rang true.

I said that whatever he would write for me, on what ever subject, at what ever time, I would accept without question or reservation, and put on the stage at my own theater: rather a remarkable pledge, seeing that our acquaintance dated from about ten minutes back; but I meant exactly what I said.

In times of war you constantly see men, and women, too, who, sooner than suffer discomfort or even inconvenience, risk death.

As the little speck drew straight overhead, these human specks suddenly realized that they were in the line of fire, and scattered just as people run from a sudden shower.

Into the fog of war that covered the Continent an army of Englishmen had vanished, none knew where.

Even in his deep distress Booth had not forgotten to be theatrical. If he must die he wished to die at the climax of a highly dramatic situation. 

Nowhere but in America would such a career as Crockett's have been possible.

It it not so surprising that there is heroism in the world, as that there is so much of it.

"Gervais," he said, "go to yonder bully, and say to him that unless his threats and boasts cease, I shall be forced to kill him."

On the hill above, amidst the granite boulders, frowns the fortress, and all around stretch the foundation blocks of a dead city

Now and again in the regular round of delinquencies there comes the unmasking of a tragedy.

A crook has got to look out for himself, and 
I didn’t trust any gang to take care of me.

Alaskan Indians paddling in their baidarkas or clustered at camp fires in their cedar forests are telling with awe the strange tale of Kebeth, the Aleut.

The reason for all the knavery was to avoid the payment of three hundred dollars to a destitute and distracted woman—that, and that alone!

I felt sure now that no doctor could tell whether people were insane or not, so long as the case was not violent.

Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell’s Island? I said I could and I would. And I did

I went back to the old home, to Denmark and to my mother; because I just couldn't stay away any longer.

The coupon looked for all the world like a dollar bill, except that it was so small that a baby’s hand could easily cover it.

We had been looking the police over by night, Roosevelt and I. We had inspected the lodging-rooms while I went over the long fight with him, and had come at last, at 2 A.M., to the Church Street Station.

In those days, somebody was always fighting somebody else for some fancied injury or act of bad faith in the gathering of the news.

Cat Alley is a back-yard illustration of the theory of evolution. The fittest survive, and the Welsh babies were not among them.

It is not my fault that the one thing that is lost more persistently than any other in a large city is the very thing you would imagine to be safest of all in the keeping of its owner.

The Germans had sentenced Louvain to become a wilderness, and with the German system and love of thoroughness they left Louvain an empty, blackened shell.

With four automatics rubbing against my ribs, I would not have lowered my arms for all the papers in the Bank of England.

The war correspondents who were sent to this war knew it was to sound their death-knell.

Ever since the opening of hostilities, the authorities at Washington had sought to effect his capture; but a year of the war had passed, and he was still spreading terror along the Potomac.

This is the true story of one of the daring expeditions that fell to the lot of the Federal Secret Service Bureau during the Civil War.

The firemen all knew that the old Jim horse was going blind. But what of that? There wasn't a horse in the service that knew the business so well as Jim.