KNIGHTS OF THE PEN.
When you come to think of it, it is surprising that so many newspaper men write so that anyone but an expert can read it. The rapid and voluminous work, especially of daily journalism, knocks the beautiful business college penman, as a rule, higher than a kite. I still have specimens of my own handwriting that a total stranger could read.
I do not remember a newspaper acquaintance whose penmanship is so characteristic of the exacting neatness and sharp, clear-cut style of the man, as that of Eugene Field, of the Chicago News. As the "Nonpareil Writer" of the Denver Tribune, it was a mystery to me when he did the work which the paper showed each day as his own. You would sometimes find him at his desk, writing on large sheets of "print paper" with a pen and violet ink, in a hand that was as delicate as the steel plate of a bank note and the kind of work that printers would skirmish for. He would ask you to sit down in the chair opposite his desk, which had two or three old exchanges thrown on it. He would probably say, "Never mind those papers. I've read them. Just sit down on them if you want to." Encouraged by his hearty manner, you would sit down, and you would continue to sit down till you had protruded about three-fourths of your system through that hollow mockery of a chair. Then he would run to help you out and curse the chair, and feel pained because he had erroneously given you the ruin with no seat to it. He always felt pained over such things. He always suffered keenly and felt shocked over the accident until you had gone away, and then he would sigh heavily and "set" the chair again.
Frank Pixley, editor of the San Francisco Argonaut, is not beautiful, though the Argonaut is. He is grim and rather on the Moses Montefiore style of countenance, but his handwriting does not convey the idea of the man personally, or his style of dealing with the Chinese question. It is rather young looking, and has the uncertain manner of an eighteen-year-old boy.
Robert J. Burdette writs a small but plain hand, though he sometimes suffers from the savage typographical error that steals forth at such a moment as ye think not and disfigures and tears and mangles the bright eyed children of the brain.
Very often we read a man's work and imagine we shall find him like it, cheery, bright and entertaining, but we know him and find that personally he is a refrigerator, or an egotist, or a man with a torpid liver and a nose like a rose geranium. You will not be disappointed in Bob Burdette, however; you think you will like him, and you always do. He will never be too famous to be a gentleman.
George W. Peck's hand is of the free and independent order of chirography. It is easy and natural, but not handsome. He writes very voluminously, doing his editorial writing in two days of the week, generally Friday and Saturday. Then he takes a rapid horse, a zealous bird dog and an improved double-barrel duck destroyer and communes with nature.
