The Making of a Novelist by David Christie Murray

I have told how I went out as 'special correspondent' to an American paper in the Russo-Turkish war. From the hour at which we said good-bye to each other on the platform of Charing Cross railway station, some seventeen years ago, until now, I have never seen the military gentleman from Chicago at whose instance I went out to watch the events of the Russo-Turkish war. When I got home again, a month after the fall of Plevna, I made inquiries about him, and learned that he had exceeded his instructions, and that if he had followed the directions laid upon him by his proprietors he himself would have gone out to the seat of war. What object he proposed to himself in shirking that duty, and in sending out a man whose salary he could not pay, I never definitely learned.

For quite a considerable time I used to call day by day at the Ottoman Bank to ask if remittances had arrived, and so long as my funds lasted I used to bombard that recalcitrant Yankee colonel with telegrams insisting on the fulfilment of his contract. He took no notice of my messages, and in a very little while things began to look desperate. It was a great thing to be on the spot, however, and after some three weeks of fruitless anger and bitter anxiety I found casual work to do under a gentleman who had constituted himself the agent of an old-fashioned London weekly. I wrote an article for this journal, entitled 'In a State of Siege,' got money down for it, and lived carefully on it for some ten days. At the end of that time, I was strolling rather disconsolately round the Concordia Gardens at night-time, when I came upon a group of men with whom I had a nodding acquaintance.