I had found who was to be the telegraph inspector for the day, and I went to him with an offer to hire a wire for the day.

This was impossible, he said, as there was to be but one wire for all the foreign press.

I put my case to him as that of a beginner in the service, to whom a success was of great importance for the future, and asked to be allowed to declare 6000 words to follow continuously; but this too, he said, was against the regulations.

But I secured his sympathy, and he finally promised me that if I got first on the wire, and my message came without interruption, one section being laid before the operator before the other was finished, they should go on without interruption, as one message; but, if one minute lapsed and another message came in the interval, I must take my turn with the others.
As Taylor was an old hand, and wrote a most legible script, and style _currente calamo_, I told him to write what he could as the ceremony went on, and, the moment the doors were opened, to consign what he had written to a messenger whom I had hired for the day,--an American clerk of one of the exhibitors under some little obligation to me, a sharp Yankee, for whose use I had hired a cab, with the fastest horse I could find, to run back and forth between the Exhibition and the telegraph.

Taylor was then to finish his account of the opening ceremonies and bring it or send it by the messenger to me at the telegraph office, the messenger waiting or returning for the first installment of Smalley's account of the imperial inspection, which he was to follow closely.