With cheerfulness and confidence had West intrusted these important matters to his young assistant.  Not only was Queed an acknowledged authority on both taxation and penological science, but he had enjoyed the advantage of writing articles on both themes under Colonel Cowles’s personal direction.  The Colonel’s bones were dust, his pen was rust, his soul was with the saints, we trust; but his gallant spirit went marching on.  He towered out of memory a demigod, and what he said and did in his lifetime had become as the law of the Medes and Persians now.

But there was never any dispute about the division of editorial honors on the Post, anyway.  The two young men, in fact, were so different in every way that their relations were a model of mutual satisfaction.  Never once did Queed’s popular chief seek to ride over his valued helper, or deny him his full share of opportunity in the department.  If anything, indeed, he leaned quite the other way.  For West lacked the plodder’s faculty for indefatigable application.  Like some rare and splendid bird, if he was kept too closely in captivity, his spirit sickened and died.

It is time to admit frankly that West, upon closer contact with newspaper work, had been somewhat disillusioned, and who that knows, will be surprised at that?  To begin with, he had been used to much freedom, and his new duties were extremely confining.  They began soon after breakfast, and no man could say at what hour they would end.  The night work, in especial, he abhorred.  It interfered with much more amusing things that had hitherto beguiled his evenings, and it also conflicted with sleep, of which he required a good deal.  There was, too, a great amount of necessary but most irksome drudgery connected with his editorial labors.  Because the Post was a leader of public thought in the State, and as such enjoyed a national standing, West found it necessary to read a vast number of papers, to keep up with what was going on.  He was also forced to write many perfunctory articles on subjects which did not interest him in the least, and about which, to tell the truth, he knew very little.  There were also a great many letters either to be answered, or to be prepared for publication in the People’s Forum column, and these letters were commonly written by dull asses who had no idea what they were talking about.  Prosy people were always coming in with requests or complaints, usually the latter.  First and last there was a quantity of grinding detail which, like the embittered old fogeyism of the Blaines College trustees, had not appeared on his rosy prospect in the Maytime preceding.