st extorted from a skipper, who, with
great plausibility, told him that he knew his vessel had brought no
news, for she never had before. (N.B. In this instance she was the only
vessel to sail, after a three months' blockade.) And then I had handed
to me by Mr. J., one of the commercial gentlemen, a private letter from
Rio Janeiro, which had been lent him. After these delays, with full
materials, I sprang to work--read, read, read; wonder, wonder, wonder;
guess, guess, guess; scratch, scratch, scratch; and scribble, scribble,
scribble, make the only transcript I can give of the operations which
followed. At first, several of the other gentlemen in the room sat
around me; but soon Mr. C., having settled the deaths and marriages, and
the police and municipal reporters immediately after him, screwed out
their lamps and went home; then the editor himself, then the legislative
reporters, then the commercial editors, then the ship-news conductor,
and left me alone.

I envied them that they got through so much earlier than usual, but
scratched on, only interrupted by the compositors coming in for the
pages of my copy as I finished them; and finally, having made my last
translation from the last _Boletin Extraordinario_, sprang up, shouting,
"Now for Mrs. P.'s," and looked at my watch. It was half past one![7] I
thought of course it had stopped,--no; and my last manuscript page was
numbered twenty-eight! Had I been writing there five hours? Yes!

Reader, when you are an editor, with a continent's explosions to
describe, you will understand how one may be unconscious of the passage
of time.

I walked home, sad at heart. There was no light in all Mr. Wentworth's
house; there was none in any of Mrs. Pollexfen's windows;[8] and the
last carriage of her last relation had left her door. I stumbled up
stairs in the dark, and threw myself on my bed. What should I say, what
could I say, to Julia? Thus pondering, I fell asleep.

If I were writing a novel, I should say that, at a late hour the next
day, I listlessly drew aside the azure curtains of my couch, and
languidly rang a silver bell which stood on my dressing-table, and
received from a page dressed in an Oriental costume the notes and
letters which had been left for me since morning, and the newspapers of
the day.

I am not writing a novel.

The next morning, about ten o'clock, I arose and went down to
breakfast. As I sat at the littered table which every one else had lef