Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, and His Romaunt Abroad During the War

by George Alfred Townsend

I could stand it no more. I bolted into the office, and cried—

"The article on the Homestead Bill is mine, so is every other article in to-day's paper. Mr. Watch does not tell the truth; he is ungenerous!"

"What's this, Watch?" said Axiom.

"Alfred," exclaimed Mr. Watch, majestically, "adopts my suggestions very readily, and is quite industrious. I recommend that we raise his salary to five dollars a week. That is a large sum for a lad."

That night the manuscript was overhauled in the composing room. Watch's dereliction was manifest; but not a word was said commendatory of my labor; it was feared I might take "airs," or covet a further increase of wages. I only missed Watch's hugh pearl, and heard that he had been discharged, and was myself taken from the drudgery of the scissors, and made a reporter.

All this was very recent, yet to me so far remote, that as I recall it all, I wonder if I am not old, and feel nervously of my hairs. For in the five intervening years I have ridden at Hoe speed down the groove of my steel-pen.

The pen is my traction engine; it has gone through worlds of fancy and reflection, dragging me behind it; and long experience has given it so great facility, that I have only to fire up, whistle, and fix my couplings, and away goes my locomotive with no end of cars in train.

Few journalists, beginning at the bottom, do not weary of the ladder ere they climb high. Few of such, or of others more enthusiastic, recall the early associations of "the office" with pleasure. Yet there is no world more grotesque, none, at least in America, more capable of fictitious illustration. Around a newspaper all the dramatis personæ of the world congregate; within it there are staid idiosyncratic folk who admit of all kindly caricature.

I summon from that humming and hurly-burly past, the ancient proof-reader. He wears a green shade over his eyes and the gas burner is drawn very low to darken the bald and wrinkled contour of his forehead. He is severe in judgment and spells rigidly by the Johnsonian standard. He punctuates by an obdurate and conscientious method, and will have no italics upon any pretext. He will lend you money, will eat with you, drink with you, and encourage you; but he will not punctuate with you, spell with you, nor accept any of your suggestions as to typography or paragraphing whatsoever. He wears slippers and smokes a primitive clay pipe; he has everything in its place, and you cannot offend him more than by looking over any proof except when he is holding it. A chip of himself is the copyholder at his side,—a meagre, freckled, matter of fact youth, who reads your tenderest sentences in a rapid monotone, and is never known to venture any opinion or suggestion whatever. This boy, I am bound to say, will follow the copy if it be all consonants, and will accompany it if it flies out of the window.

The office clerk was my bane and admiration. He was presumed by the verdant patrons of the paper to be its owner and principal editor, its type-setter, pressman, and carrier. His hair was elaborately curled, and his ears were perfect racks of long and dandyfied pens; a broad, shovel-shaped gold pen lay forever opposite his high stool; he had an arrogant and patronizing address, and was the perpetual cabbager of editorial perquisites. Books, ball-tickets, season-tickets, pictures, disappeared in his indiscriminate fist, and he promised notices which he could not write to no end of applicants. He was to be seen at the theatre every night, and he was the dashing escort of the proprietor's wife, who preferred his jaunty coat and highly-polished boots to the less elaborate wardrobe of us writers. That this noble and fashionable creature could descend to writing wrappers, and to waiting his turn with a bank-book in the long train of a sordid teller, passed all speculation and astonishment. He made a sorry fag of the office boy, and advised us every day to beware of cutting the files, as if that were the one vice of authors. To him we stole, with humiliated faces, and begged a trifling advance of salary. He sternly requested us not to encroach behind the counter—his own indisputable domain—but sometimes asked us to watch the office while he drank with a theatrical agent at the nearest bar. He was an inveterate gossip, and endowed with a damnable love of slipshod argument; the only oral censor upon our compositions, he hailed us with all the complaints made at his solicitation by irascible subscribers, and stood in awe of the cashier only, who frequently, to our delight and surprise, combed him over, and drove him to us for sympathy.