to destroy
this journal. I want you to throw up your situation and go. I want no
more holiday--I could not enjoy it if I had it. Certainly not with you
in my chair. I would always stand in dread of what you might be going to
recommend next. It makes me lose all patience every time I think of your
discussing oyster-beds under the head of 'Landscape Gardening.' I want
you to go. Nothing on earth could persuade me to take another holiday.
Oh! why didn't you tell me you didn't know anything about agriculture?"

"Tell you, you corn-stalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower? It's
the first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark. I tell you I have
been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the
first time I ever heard of a man's having to know anything in order to
edit a newspaper. You turnip! Who write the dramatic critiques for the
second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice
apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good
farming and no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one.
Who do up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest
opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticize the Indian
campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who
never have had to run a foot-race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of
the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire
with. Who write the temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing
bowl? Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in
the grave. Who edit the agricultural papers, you--yam? Men, as a
general thing, who fail in the poetry line, yellow-colored novel line,
sensation, drama line, city-editor line, and finally fall back on
agriculture as a temporary reprieve from the poorhouse. You try to tell
me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it
from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger
the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands. Heaven knows
if I had but been ignorant instead of cultivated, and impudent instead of
diffident, I could have made a name for myself in this cold, selfish
world. I take my leave, sir. Since I have been treated as you have
treated me, I am perfectly willing to go. But I have done my duty. I
have fulfilled my contract as far as I was permitted to do it. I said I
could make you