midnight
A smart New Yorker had got a `` scoop '' by slipping ashore at Queenstown and cabling a lavish account to the American Press Association , so that the first news reached London from the States . Followed Reuter 's man and the Liverpool reporters on Prince 's landing-stage , who came to glean copy as in the ordinary course of events , and they being spurred on by wires from London for full details , got down all the facts available , and imagined others . Parliament was not sitting , and there had been no newspaper sensation for a week , and , as a natural consequence , the papers came out next morning with accounts of the rescue varying from two columns to a page in length . It is one of the most wonderful attributes of the modern Press that it can , at any time between midnight and publishing hours , collate and elaborate the biography of a man who hitherto has been entirely obscure , and considering the speed of the work , and the difficulties which hedge it in , these lightning life sketches are often surprisingly full of accuracies . But let the frillings in this case be fact or fiction , there was no doubt that Kettle and his crew had saved a shipload of panic-stricken foreign emigrants , and -LRB- to help point the moral -RRB- within the year , in an almost similar case , another shipload had been drowned through that same blind , helpless , hopeless panic . The pride of race bubbled through the British Daily Press in prosaic long primer and double-leaded bourgeois . There was no saying aloud , `` We rejoice that an Englishman has done this thing , after having it proved to us that it was above the foreigner 's strength . ''