'Sha, Ebenezer!' said old Sugarman imperiously.
De Haan thereupon hunted up a young gentleman who dwelt in his mind as 'Little Sampson,' and straightway secured him at the price named. He was a lively young Bohemian, born in Australia, who had served an apprenticeship on the Anglo-Jewish press, worked his way up into the larger journalistic world without, and was now engaged in organising a comic-opera touring company, and in drifting back again into Jewish journalism. This young gentleman, who always wore long curling locks, an eyeglass, and a romantic cloak which covered a multitude of shabbinesses, fully allayed Raphael's fears as to the difficulties of editorship.
'Obituaries!' he said scornfully; 'you rely on me for that. The people who are worth chronicling are sure to have lived in the back numbers of our contemporaries, and I can always hunt them up in the Museum. As for the people who are not, their families will send them in, and your only trouble will be to conciliate the families of those you ignore.'
'But about all those meetings?' said Raphael.
'I'll go to some,' said the sub-editor good-naturedly, 'whenever they don't interfere with the rehearsals of my opera. You know, of course, I am bringing out a comic opera, composed by myself. Some lovely tunes in it! One goes like this: "Ta-ra-ra-ta, ta-dee-dum-dee." That'll knock 'em. Well, as I was saying, I'll help you as much as I can find time for. You rely on me for that.'
'Yes,' said poor Raphael, with a sickly smile; 'but suppose neither of us goes to some important meeting.'
'No harm done. God bless you! I know the styles of all our chief speakers—ahem, ha!—pauperisation of the East End, ha!—I would emphatically say that this scheme—ahem!—his lordship's untiring zeal for—hum!—the welfare of—and so on. Ta-dee-dum-da, ta-ra, rum-dee. They always send on the agenda beforehand. That's all I want, and I'll lay you twenty to one I'll turn out as good a report as any of our rivals. You rely on me for that. I know exactly how debates go. At the worst I can always swop with another reporter—a prize distribution for an obituary; or a funeral for a concert.'
'And do you really think we two between us can fill up the paper every week?' said Raphael doubtfully.
Little Sampson broke into a shriek of laughter, dropped his eyeglass, and collapsed helplessly into the coal-scuttle. The committee-men looked up from their confabulations in astonishment.
'Fill up the paper! Ho, ho, ho!' roared Little Sampson, still doubled up. 'Evidently you've never had anything to do with papers. Why, the reports of London and provincial sermons alone would fill three papers a week.'