a day—­ according to the exigencies.  He is obliged to use it a million times a day, if he have occasion to speak of respectable men and women that often; for he has no other phrase for such service except that single one.  He never tires of it; it always has a fine sound to him.  There is a kind of swell medieval bulliness and tinsel about it that pleases his gaudy barbaric soul.  If he had been in Palestine in the early times, we should have had no references to ‘much people’ out of him.  No, he would have said ‘the beauty and the chivalry of Galilee’ assembled to hear the Sermon on the Mount.  It is likely that the men and women of the South are sick enough of that phrase by this time, and would like a change, but there is no immediate prospect of their getting it.

The New Orleans editor has a strong, compact, direct, unflowery style; wastes no words, and does not gush.  Not so with his average correspondent.  In the Appendix I have quoted a good letter, penned by a trained hand; but the average correspondent hurls a style which differs from that.  For instance—­

The ‘Times-Democrat’ sent a relief-steamer up one of the bayous, last April.  This steamer landed at a village, up there somewhere, and the Captain invited some of the ladies of the village to make a short trip with him.  They accepted and came aboard, and the steamboat shoved out up the creek.  That was all there was ‘to it.’  And that is all that the editor of the ‘Times-Democrat’ would have got out of it.  There was nothing in the thing but statistics, and he would have got nothing else out of it.  He would probably have even tabulated them, partly to secure perfect clearness of statement, and partly to save space.  But his special correspondent knows other methods of handling statistics.  He just throws off all restraint and wallows in them—­

’On Saturday, early in the morning, the beauty of the place graced our cabin, and proud of her fair freight the gallant little boat glided up the bayou.’

Twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboard and the boat shoved out up the creek, is a clean waste of ten good words, and is also destructive of compactness of statement.

The trouble with the Southern reporter is—­Women.  They unsettle him; they throw him off his balance.  He is plain, and sensible, and satisfactory, until a woman heaves in sight.  Then he goes all to pieces; his mind totters, he becomes flowery and idiotic.  From reading the above extract, you would imagine that this student of Sir Walter Scott is an apprentice, and knows next to nothing about handling a pen.  On the contrary, he furnishes plenty of proofs, in his long letter, that he knows well enough how to handle it when the women are not around to give him the artificial-flower complaint.  For instance—­