villains, we
never had the heart to tease him again, and now every one around the
office has instructions to put "General" before his name whenever it is
used. Probably this cheers him up. At least it should do so, for in
spite of his pride and his much advertised undying wrath, he is in truth
a tender-hearted old man, and has never been disloyal to the town. It is
the apple of his eye. His fierceness has always been more for
publication than as an evidence of good faith. He likes to think that he
is unforgiving and relentless, but he has a woman's heart. He fought the
renomination of Grant for a third term most bitterly, but when the old
commander died, the boys in the _Statesman_ office say that Durham
sniffled gently while he wrote the obituary, and when he closed with the
words "Poor Grant," he laid his head on the table and his frame shook in
real sorrow.

Most of the subscribers have left his paper, and few of the advertisers
use it, but what seems to hurt him worst is his feeling that the town
has gone back on him. He has given all of his life to this town; he has
spent thousands of dollars to promote its growth; he has watched every
house on the town-site rise, and has made an item in his paper about it;
he has written up the weddings of many of the grandmothers and
grandfathers of the town; he has chronicled the birth of their children
and children's children. The old scrapbooks are filled with kind things
that the General has written. Old men and old women scan these wrinkled
pages with eyes that have lost their lustre, and on the rusty clippings
pasted there fall many tears. In this book many a woman reads the little
verse below the name of a child whom only she and God remember. In some
other scrapbook a man, long since out of the current of life, reads the
story of his little triumph in the world; in the family Bible is a
clipping from the _Statesman_--yellow and crisp with years--that tells
of a daughter's wedding and the social glory that descended upon the
house for that one great day. So, as the General goes about the streets
of the town, in his shiny long frock-coat and his faded campaign hat,
men do not laugh at him, nor do they hate him. He is the old buffalo,
horned out of the herd.

The profession of newspaper making is a young man's profession. The time
will come when over at our office there will be a shrinkage. Even now
our leading citizens never go away from town and talk to other newspaper