THE PUBLIC PRINTER.
VERY few of the great mass of humanity know who makes the beautiful
public document, with its plain, black binding and wealth of statistics. Few stop to think that hidden away from the great work-a-day world, with eyelids heavy and red, and with finger-nails black with antimony, toiling on at his case hour after hour, the public printer, during the sessions of Congress, is setting up the thrilling chapters of the Congressional Record, and between times yanking the Washington press backward and forward, with his suspenders hanging down, as he prints this beautiful sea-side library of song.
We are too prone to read that which gives us pleasure without thought of the labor necessary to its creation. We glide gaily through the Congressional Record, pleased with its more attractive features, viz: its ayes and noes—little recking that Sterling P. Rounds, the public printer, stands in the subdued gaslight with his stick half full, trying to decipher the manuscript of some reticent representative, whose speech was yesterday delivered to the janitor as he polished the porcelain cuspidor of Congress.
This is a day and age of the world when men take that which comes to them, and do not stop to investigate the pain and toil it costs. They never inquire into the mystery of manufacture, or try to learn the details of its construction. Most of our libraries are replete with books which we have received at the hands of a generous government, and yet we treat those volumes with scorn and contumely. We jeer at the footsore bugologist who has chased the large, green worm from tree to tree, in order that we may be wise. We speak sneeringly of the man who stuffs the woodtick, and paints the gaudy wings of the squash-bug that we may know how often she orates.
Year after year the entomologist treads the same weary road with his bait-box tied to his waist, wooing to his laboratory the army-worm and the sheep-scab larvæ in order that we, poor particles on the surface of the great earth, may know how these minute creatures rise, flourish and decay.