yesterday. He is stopping at the Van Buren House.
We observe that our contemporary of the Mud Springs Morning Howl has
fallen into the error of supposing that the election of Van Werter
is not an established fact, but he will have discovered his mistake
before this reminder reaches him, no doubt. He was doubtless misled
by incomplete election returns.
It is pleasant to note that the city of Blathersville is endeavoring
to contract with some New York gentlemen to pave its well-nigh
impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement. The Daily Hurrah
urges the measure with ability, and seems confident of ultimate
success.
I passed my manuscript over to the chief editor for acceptance,
alteration, or destruction. He glanced at it and his face clouded. He
ran his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous. It was
easy to see that something was wrong. Presently he sprang up and said:
“Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those
cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such
gruel as that? Give me the pen!”
I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way sc viciously, or plow
through another man’s verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he was
in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window,
and marred the symmetry of my ear.
“Ah,” said he, “that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano–he
was due yesterday.” And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and
fired–Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith’s aim,
who was just taking a second chance and he crippled a stranger. It was
me. Merely a finger shot off.
Then the chief editor went on with his erasure; and interlineations.
Just as he finished them a hand grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the
explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did
no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my
teeth out.
“That stove is utterly ruined,” said the chief editor.
I said I believed it was.
“Well, no matter–don’t want it this kind of weather. I know the man
that did it. I’ll get him. Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be
written.”
I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations
till its mother wouldn’t have known it if it had had one. It now read as
follows:
SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently
endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another
of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most
glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack
railroad. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side
originated in their own fulsome brains–or rather in the settlings
which they regard as brains. They had better, swallow this lie if
they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhiding
they so richly deserve.
That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of
Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.
We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning
Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van
Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journalism is to
disseminate truth; to eradicate error; to educate, refine, and
elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more
gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and
holier, and happier; and yet this blackhearted scoundrel degrades
his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood,
calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.
Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement–it wants a jail and a
poorhouse more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town composed
of two gin-mills, a blacksmith shop, and that mustard-plaster of a
newspaper, the Daily Hurrah! The crawling insect, Buckner, who
edits the Hurrah, is braying about his business with his customary
imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense.
“Now that is the way to write–peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk
journalism gives me the fan-tods.”
About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering crash,