be popular with all alike. He
came along fresh, hearty, healthy, full of sunlight, brimming over with
news, fresh from contact with the great people in Halifax,--yet one of
the plain people, hailing them Tom and Jack, and as happy with them as if
in the king's palace. 'Joe Howe came to our house last night,' bragged a
little girl as she skipped along to school next morning; 'he kissed mamma
and kissed me too.' The familiarity was seldom rebuked, for his
heartiness was contagious. He was as full of jokes as a pedlar, and had
as few airs. A brusqueness of manner and coarseness of speech, which was
partly natural, became thus {26} ingrained in him, and party struggles
subsequently coarsened his moral fibre. From this absence of refinement
flowed a lack of perception of the fitting that often made him speak
loosely, even when men and women were by to whom such a style gave
positive pain. No doubt much of his coarseness, like that of every
humorist, was based on honesty and hatred of shams. When he saw silly
peacocks strutting about and trying to fill the horizon with their tails,
he could not help ruffling their feathers and making them scream, were it
only to let the world know how unmelodious were their voices. It was
generally in the presence of prudes that he referred to unnamable things;
and he most affected low phrases when he talked to very superfine people.
Still, the vein of coarseness was in him, like the baser stuffs in the
ores of precious metals; but his literary taste kept his writings pure.

From his twenty-third to his thirty-first year his education went on in
connection with his editorial and other professional work. He became
intimate with the leading men in the town. He had trusty friends all
over the country. His paper and he were identified as paper and editor
have seldom been. All correspondence was addressed, not to an {27}
unknown figure of vast, ill-defined proportions called Mr Editor, but
simply to Joseph Howe. Even when it was known that he was absent in
Europe, the country correspondence always came, and was published in the
old way:

'Mr Joseph Howe, Sir----.' He cordially welcomed literary talent of all
kinds, giving every man full swing on his own hobby, and changing rapidly
from grave to gay, from lively to severe. He cultivated from the first
the journalistic spirit of giving fair play in his columns to both sides,
even when one of the sides was the editor or the proprieto