"No," said the censor, "you cannot be allowed to lose anything by your kindness. Two hundred pounds will be the utmost cost, eh? Well, I think that Westminster, Dudley, and I, can raise that between us."
We held our breaths for a moment as he said this, for it flashed upon us that the heir of Lord Derby, the owner of the great Dudley estates, and the greatest landlord of London, were to be our backers, that they were high up among the richest men of England, and that one of them was saying he was hopeful that among all three two hundred pounds might not prove an impossible sum to raise.
"Yes, that's all right," Lord Stanley repeated; "I think that Dudley, Westminster, and I can manage it."
The reader will not be prepared to hear that anything funnier than that could grow out of this situation. But it was to be so. Weeks after our singular editorial experience ended I received, while in Capetown, a letter from an interested Afrikander asking me whether I thought the three men who guaranteed Barlow against a loss of profits from his paper were responsible men, and Barlow would be likely to get his money.
I went away to nurse my injured leg, and the other editors went their ways to arrange for getting out a new paper, which all of us agreed should be christened with the now historic name of THE FRIEND. While we are thus separated from them let me draw a pen picture of each.
Perceval Landon, representing the _Times_, is a university man, who has been admitted to the bar, and who took up the work of a war correspondent from an Englishman's love of adventure, danger, and excitement. It can be nothing but his English blood that prompted him to this course, for in mind and temperament, tastes and qualifications, he is at once a scholar and a poet rather than a man of violent action. Had the _Times_ so desired he would have charmed the public with letters from the front as human and picturesque in subject and treatment as any that were sent to London. His charms of manner and of mind caused his companionship to be sought by the most distinguished and the most polished men in the army, and all were deeply sorry when, at the close of the army's stay in Bloemfontein, illness forced him to return to London, though not until he had served in the war as long as any man at that time on the west side of the continent.