im the name of Old Bull Durham. On such occasions, he
would throw back his head, shut his eyes and roar his wrath at his
opponents in a most disquieting manner, and when he returned home,
whether he had won or lost his fight, his paper would bristle for two or
three weeks with rage, and his editorial page would be full of lurid
articles written in short exclamatory sentences, pocked with italics,
capital letters and black-faced lines.

[Illustration: He advertised the fact that he was a good hater by
showing callers at his office his barrel]

For General A. Jackson Durham was a fire-eater and was proud of it. He
advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing his barrel to
callers at his office. In that barrel he had filed away every
disreputable thing that he had been able to find against friend or foe,
far or near, and when the friend became a foe, or the foe became
troublesome, the General opened his barrel. He kept also an office
blacklist, on which were written the names of the men in town that were
never to be printed in the _Statesman_. When we established our little
handbill of a newspaper, he made all manner of fun of our "dish-rag," as
he called it, and insisted on writing so much about our paper that
people read it to see what we had to say. Other papers had made the
mistake of replying to the General in kind, and people had soon tired of
the quarrel and dropped the new quarrelling paper for the old one. The
State never had seen the General's equal as a wrangler; but we did not
fight back, and there was only a one-sided quarrel for the people to
tire of. We grew and got a foothold in the town, but the General never
admitted it. He does not admit it now, though his paper has been cut
down time and again, and is no larger than our little dish-rag was in
the beginning. But he still maintains his old assumption of the power
that departed years ago. He walked proudly out of the County Convention
the day that it rode over him, and he still begins the names of the new
party leaders in the county in small letters to show his contempt for
them.

The day of his downfall in the County Convention marked the beginning of
his decline in State politics. When it was known that his county was
against him, people ceased to fear him and in time new leaders came in
the State whom he did not know even by sight; but the General did not
recognise them as leaders. To him they were interlopers. He sent his
paper regularly