g 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 criticise the Indian
campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who
never have had to run a footrace 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 clamour 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-coloured 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 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 run your circulation up to twenty thousand copies, and if I
had had two more weeks I'd have done it. And I'd have given you the best
class of readers that ever an agricultural paper had--not a farmer in
it, nor a solitary individual who could tell a water-melon tree from a
peach-vine to save his life. _You_ are the loser by this rupture, not
me, Pie-plant. Adios."

I then left.

A TUR'BLE CHAP
[Sidenote: _Anon._]

If all t' kisses as Oi ha' tuke
Wuz zet down vair an' square inter buke,
Lard! Lard! 'twud make t' greaaet volk say:
_"What a tur'ble chap is ole Joe Gay!"_
Vor it du zet ma brain a-swimmin'
Tu think o' all t' _hundered_ wimmin
As Oi ha' bussed 'hind hedg