About General Sickles¹

With considerable frequency, since then, I have tried to get publishers to make the experiment of such a magazine, but I was never successful. I was never able to convince a publisher that The Back Number would interest the public. Not one of them was able to conceive of the idea of a sane² human being finding interest in stale things. I made my latest effort three years ago. Again I failed to convince. But I, myself, am not convinced. I am quite sure that The Back Number would succeed and become a favorite. I am also sure of another thing--that The Back Number would have this advantage over any other magazine that was ever issued, to wit: that the man who read the first paragraph in it would go on and read the magazine entirely³ through, skipping nothing--whereas there is no magazine in existence which ever contains three articles which can be depended upon to interest the reader. It is necessary to put a dozen articles into a magazine of the day in order to hit six or eight tastes. One man buys the magazine for one of its articles, another is attracted by another, another by a third; but no man buys the magazine because of the whole of its contents. I contend that The Back Number would be bought for the whole of its contents and that each reader would read the whole.
Mr. Paine, you and I will start that magazine, and try the experiment, if you are willing to select the ancient news from old books and newspapers and do the rest of the editorial work. Are you willing?
Mr. Paine. "I should be very willing, when we get time to undertake it."
"Very well, then we will, by and by, make that experiment."
Twichell and I stepped across the street, that night, in the rain, and spent an hour with General Sickles. Sickles is eighty-one years old, now. I had met him only once or twice before, although there has been only the width of Ninth Street between us for a year. He is too old to make visits, and I am too lazy. I remember when he killed Philip Barton Key, son of the author of "The Star-spangled Banner," and I remember the prodigious⁵ excitement it made in the country. I think it cannot be far from fifty years ago. My vague recollection of it is that it happened in Washington and that I was there at the time.
I have felt well acquainted with General Sickles for thirty-eight or thirty-nine years, because I have known Twichell that long. Twichell was a chaplain in Sickles's brigade in the Civil War, and he was always fond of talking about the general. Twichell was under Sickles all through the war. Whenever he comes down from Hartford he makes it his duty to go and pay his respects to the general. Sickles is a

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