them around at dawn Thursday mornings. The carrier was then
an object of interest to all the dogs in town. If I had saved up all
the bites I ever received, I could keep M. Pasteur busy for a year.
I enveloped the papers that were for the mail--we had a hundred
town subscribers and three hundred and fifty country ones; the town
subscribers paid in groceries and the country ones in cabbages and
cord-wood--when they paid at all, which was merely sometimes, and then
we always stated the fact in the paper, and gave them a puff; and if we
forgot it they stopped the paper. Every man on the town list helped
edit the thing--that is, he gave orders as to how it was to be edited;
dictated its opinions, marked out its course for it, and every time the
boss failed to connect he stopped his paper. We were just infested with
critics, and we tried to satisfy them all over. We had one subscriber
who paid cash, and he was more trouble than all the rest. He bought
us once a year, body and soul, for two dollars. He used to modify our
politics every which way, and he made us change our religion four times
in five years. If we ever tried to reason with him, he would threaten to
stop his paper, and, of course, that meant bankruptcy and destruction.
That man used to write articles a column and a half long, leaded long
primer, and sign them "Junius," or "Veritas," or "Vox Populi," or some
other high-sounding rot; and then, after it was set up, he would come
in and say he had changed his mind-which was a gilded figure of speech,
because he hadn't any--and order it to be left out. We couldn't afford
"bogus" in that office, so we always took the leads out, altered the
signature, credited the article to the rival paper in the next village,
and put it in. Well, we did have one or two kinds of "bogus." Whenever
there was a barbecue, or a circus, or a baptizing, we knocked off for
half a day, and then to make up for short matter we would "turn over
ads"--turn over the whole page and duplicate it. The other "bogus" was
deep philosophical stuff, which we judged nobody ever read; so we kept
a galley of it standing, and kept on slapping the same old batches of it
in, every now and then, till it got dangerous. Also, in the early days
of the telegraph we used to economize on the news. We picked out the
items that were pointless and barren of information and stood them on
a galley, and changed the dates and localities, and used them over and
over again till th