at night of scallops fried in poor lard, and a little too much bourbon, the next day he is headachy, and says Foster, the scalawag, ought to be hung, or beaten to death with his own car-hook, and the ministers who went to Albany to get him pardoned might better have been taking tea with some of the old ladies.  I have been behind the scenes and know all about it, and must admit that I have done some of the bad work myself.  I have on my writing-stand thirty or forty books to discuss as a critic, and the column must be made up.  Do you think I take time to read the thirty or forty books?  No.  I first take a dive into the index, a second dive into the preface, a third dive into the four hundredth page, the fourth dive into the seventieth page, and then seize my pen and do up the whole job in fifteen minutes.  I make up my mind to like the book or not to like it, according as I admire or despise the author.  But the leniency or severity of my article depends on whether the room is cold and my rheumatism that day is sharp or easy.  Speaking of these things reminds me that the sermon which the Right Reverend Bishop Goodenough preached last Sunday, on ‘Growth in Grace,’ was taken down and brought to our office by a reporter who fell over the door-sill of the sanctum so drunk we had to help him up and fish in his pockets for the bishop’s sermon on holiness of heart and life, which we were sure was somewhere about him.”

“Tut! tut!” cried Dr. Butterfield.  “I think, Mr. Givemfits, you are entirely mistaken. (The doctor all the while stirring the sugar in his cup.) I think the printing-press is a mighty agency for the world’s betterment.  If I were not a minister, I would be an editor.  There are Bohemians in the newspaper profession, as in all others, but do not denounce the entire apostleship for the sake of one Judas.  Reporters, as I know them, are clever fellows, worked almost to death, compelled to keep unseasonable hours, and have temptations to fight which few other occupations endure.  Considering the blunders and indistinctness of the public speaker, I think they get things wonderfully accurate.  The speaker murders the king’s English, and is mad because the reporter cannot resuscitate the corpse.  I once made a speech at an ice-cream festival amid great embarrassments, and hemmed, and hawed, and expectorated cotton from my dry mouth, and sweat like a Turkish bath, the adjectives, and the nouns, and verbs, and prepositions of my address keeping an Irish wake; but the next day, in the ‘Johnstown Advocate,’ my remarks read as gracefully as Addison’s ‘Spectator.’  I knew a phonographer in Washington whose entire business it was to weed out from Congressmen’s speeches the sins against Anglo-Saxon; but the work was too much for him, and he died of delirium tremens, from having drank too much of the wine of syntax, in his ravings imagining that ‘interrogations’ were crawling over him like snakes, and that ‘interjections’ were thrusting him through with daggers and ‘periods’