I want no more holiday—­I could not enjoy it if I had it.  Certainly not with you in my chair.  I would always stand in dread of what you might be going to recommend next.  It makes me lose all patience every time I think of your discussing oyster-beds under the head of ‘Landscape Gardening.’  I want you to go.  Nothing on earth could persuade me to take another holiday.  Oh! why didn’t you tell me you didn’t know anything about agriculture?”

“Tell you, you cornstalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower?  It’s the first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark.  I tell you I have been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man’s having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper.  You turnip!  Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers?  Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming, and no more.  Who review the books?  People who never wrote one.  Who do up the heavy leaders on finance?  Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it.  Who criticise the Indian campaigns?  Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who never have had to run a footrace with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire with.  Who write the temperance appeals, and clamour about the flowing bowl?  Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave.  Who edit the agricultural papers, you—­yam?  Men, as a general thing, who fail in the poetry line, yellow-coloured novel line, sensation-drama line, city-editor line, and finally fall back on agriculture as a temporary reprieve from the poorhouse. You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business!  Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.  Heaven knows if I had but been ignorant instead of cultivated, and impudent instead of diffident, I could have made a name for myself in this cold, selfish world.  I take my leave, sir.  Since I have been treated as you have treated me, I am perfectly willing to go.  But I have done my duty.  I have fulfilled my contract as far as I was permitted to do it....  I said I could run your circulation up to twenty thousand copies, and if I had had two more weeks I’d have done it.  And I’d have given you the best class of readers that ever an agricultural paper had—­not a farmer in it, nor a solitary individual who could tell a water-melon tree from a peach-vine to save his life. You are the loser by this rupture, not me, Pie-plant.  Adios.”

I then left.

A TUR’BLE CHAP
[Sidenote:  Anon.]