I instance this to show that the colyumist is likely to begin his job
with the conception that it is to be a perpetual uproar of mirth and
high spirits. This lasts about a week. He then learns, in secret, to
take it rather seriously. He has to deal with the most elusive and
grotesque material he knows--his own mind; and the unhappy creature,
everlastingly probing himself in the hope of discovering what is so rare
in minds (a thought), is likely to end in a ferment of bitterness. The
happiest times in life are when one can just live along and enjoy things
as they happen. If you have to be endlessly speculating, watching, and
making mental notes, your brain-gears soon get a hot box. The original
of all paragraphers--Ecclesiastes--came very near ending as a complete
cynic; though in what F. P. A. would call his "lastline," he managed to
wriggle into a more hopeful mood.

The first valuable discovery that the colyumist is likely to make is
that all minds are very much the same. The doctors tell us that all
patent medicines are built on a stock formula--a sedative, a purge, and
a bitter. If you are to make steady column-topers out of your readers,
your daily dose must, as far as possible, average up to that same
prescription. If you employ the purge all the time, or the sedative, or
the acid, your clients will soon ask for something with another label.

Don Marquis once wrote an admirable little poem called "A Colyumist's
Prayer." Mr. Marquis, who is the king of all colyumists, realizes that
there is what one may call a religious side in colyumizing. It is hard
to get the colyumist to admit this, for he fears spoofing worse than the
devil; but it is eminently true. If I were the owner of a newspaper, I
think I would have painted up on the wall of the local room the
following words from Isaiah, the best of all watchwords for all who
write:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put
darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for
sweet, and sweet for bitter!

The most painful privilege of the colyumist's job is the number of
people who drop in to see him, usually when he is imprecating his way
toward the hour of going to press. This is all a part of the great and
salutary human instinct against work. When people see a man toiling,
they have an irresistible impulse to crowd round and stop him. They seem
to imagine that he has been put there on purpose to help them solve
their