Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor.  It is easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write editorials.  Subjects are the trouble—­the dreary lack of them, I mean.  Every day, it is drag, drag, drag—­think, and worry and suffer—­all the world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled.  Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done—­it is no trouble to write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year.  It makes one low spirited simply to think of it.  The matter that each editor of a daily paper in America writes in the course of a year would fill from four to eight bulky volumes like this book!  Fancy what a library an editor’s work would make, after twenty or thirty years’ service.  Yet people often marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas, etc., have been able to produce so many books.  If these authors had wrought as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed.  How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible.  Preachers take two months’ holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing, in the long run.  In truth it must be so, and is so; and therefore, how an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build upon them from ten to twenty painstaking editorials a week and keep it up all the year round, is farther beyond comprehension than ever.  Ever since I survived my week as editor, I have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper that comes to my hand; it is in admiring the long columns of editorial, and wondering to myself how in the mischief he did it!

Mr. Goodman’s return relieved me of employment, unless I chose to become a reporter again.  I could not do that; I could not serve in the ranks after being General of the army.  So I thought I would depart and go abroad into the world somewhere.  Just at this juncture, Dan, my associate in the reportorial department, told me, casually, that two citizens had been trying to persuade him to go with them to New York and aid in selling a rich silver mine which they had discovered and secured in a new mining district in our neighborhood.  He said they offered to pay his expenses and give him one third of the proceeds of the sale.  He had refused to go.  It was the very opportunity I wanted.  I abused him for keeping so quiet about it, and not mentioning it sooner.  He said it had not occurred to him that I would like to go, and so he had recommended them to apply to Marshall, the reporter of the other paper.