too lavish with the stranger. The paragraphs which I
have written to-day, and into whose cold sentences your masterly
hand has infused the fervent spirit of Tennessean journalism, will
wake up another nest of hornets. All that mob of editors will
come--and they will come hungry, too, and want somebody for
breakfast. I shall have to bid you adieu. I decline to be present
at these festivities. I came South for my health; I will go back on
the same errand, and suddenly. Tennessean journalism is too
stirring for me."

After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at
the hospital.

Nicodemus Dodge--Printer

When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri, a
loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad, countrified cub
of about sixteen lounged in one day, and without removing his hands
from the depths of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded
ruin of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged about
his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage-leaf, stared
indifferently around, then leaned his hip against the editors'
table, crossed his mighty brogans, aimed at a distant fly from a
crevice in his upper teeth, laid him low, and said, with composure:

"Whar's the boss?"

"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious bit of
architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face with his eye.

"Don't want anybody fur to learn the business, 'tain't likely?"

"Well, I don't know. Would you like to learn it?"

"Pap's so po' he cain't run me no mo', so I want to git a show
somers if I kin, 'tain't no diffunce what--I'm strong and hearty,
and I don't turn my back on no kind of work, hard nur soft."

"Do you think you would like to learn the printing business?"

"Well, I don't re'ly k'yer a durn what I _do_ learn, so's I git a
chance fur to make my way. I'd jist as soon learn print'n' 's
anything."

"Can you read?"

"Yes--middlin'."

"Write?"

"Well, I've seed people could lay over me thar."

"Cipher?"

"Not good enough to keep store, I don't reckon, but up as fur as
twelve-times-twelve I ain't no slouch. 'Tother side of that is what
gits me."

"Where is your home?"

"I'm f'm old Shelby."

"What's your father's religious denomination?"

"Him? Oh, he's a blacksmith."

"No, no--I don't mean his trade. What's his _religious_
denomination?"

"_Oh_--I didn't understand you befo'. He's a Freemason."

"No, no; you don't get my meaning yet. What I mean is,