all over.  We had one subscriber who paid cash, and he was more trouble than all the rest.  He bought us once a year, body and soul, for two dollars.  He used to modify our politics every which way, and he made us change our religion four times in five years.  If we ever tried to reason with him, he would threaten to stop his paper, and, of course, that meant bankruptcy and destruction.  That man used to write articles a column and a half long, leaded long primer, and sign them “Junius,” or “Veritas,” or “Vox Populi,” or some other high-sounding rot; and then, after it was set up, he would come in and say he had changed his mind-which was a gilded figure of speech, because he hadn’t any—­and order it to be left out.  We couldn’t afford “bogus” in that office, so we always took the leads out, altered the signature, credited the article to the rival paper in the next village, and put it in.  Well, we did have one or two kinds of “bogus.”  Whenever there was a barbecue, or a circus, or a baptizing, we knocked off for half a day, and then to make up for short matter we would “turn over ads”—­turn over the whole page and duplicate it.  The other “bogus” was deep philosophical stuff, which we judged nobody ever read; so we kept a galley of it standing, and kept on slapping the same old batches of it in, every now and then, till it got dangerous.  Also, in the early days of the telegraph we used to economize on the news.  We picked out the items that were pointless and barren of information and stood them on a galley, and changed the dates and localities, and used them over and over again till the public interest in them was worn to the bone.  We marked the ads, but we seldom paid any attention to the marks afterward; so the life of a “td” ad and a “tf” ad was equally eternal.  I have seen a “td” notice of a sheriff’s sale still booming serenely along two years after the sale was over, the sheriff dead, and the whole circumstance become ancient history.  Most of the yearly ads were patent-medicine stereotypes, and we used to fence with them.

I can see that printing-office of prehistoric times yet, with its horse bills on, the walls, its “d” boxes clogged with tallow, because we always stood the candle in the “k” box nights, its towel, which was not considered soiled until it could stand alone, and other signs and symbols that marked the establishment of that kind in the Mississippi Valley; and I can see, also, the tramping “jour,” who flitted by in the summer and tarried a day, with his wallet stuffed with one shirt and a hatful of handbills; for if he couldn’t get any type to set he would do a temperance lecture.  His way of life was simple, his needs not complex; all he wanted was plate and bed and money enough to get drunk on, and he was satisfied.  But it may be, as I have said, that I am among strangers, and sing the glories of a forgotten age to unfamiliar ears, so I will “make even” and stop.

SOCIETY OF AMERICAN AUTHORS