It is five hours yet before my lady arouses in her boudoir, and hundreds of her slaves are astir in her service. When she seats herself at ten at the breakfast table arrayed in becoming morning toilet, she never thinks of her loyal vassals that have been toiling during the night to prepare her dainty breakfast. Miles away the milkman and his assistants rise at 2 o’clock to procure the milk for her tea; the baker many hours earlier to furnish her toast and rolls, and the newspaper she so idly glances at represents twenty-four hours’ continuous labor of the brainiest, most intelligent, courtly, learned and fascinating set of men in the world.
The night editor stops, perhaps, to eat a light lunch at a stand, and chat a few minutes with the night workers he meets there. As he wends his way homeward, he meets a citizen who has for once for some reason arisen at what seems to him an unholy hour of the morning.
“Good morning,” says the citizen, “what in the world are you doing up so early?”
“Oh,” says the night editor, “we newspaper men have to rise real early in order to get the paper out by breakfast time.”
“To be sure, to be sure,” says the citizen. “I never thought of that!”
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, March 29, 1896.)
Newspaper Poets
The journalist-poet seems to be a hybrid born of the present day when rapidity and feverish haste are the necessary conditions to success. There is hardly a newspaper of the first class in the land that does not include a jingler in its staff.
A journalist is one thing, and a poet should be another. A combination of the two—or rather a man who tries to do the work of both—is very nearly a union of opposites.
A journalist is a recorder of transient impressions; he seizes whatever is worthy of note from the swiftly-moving stream of current events, and stamping his data with the seal of his own originality—if he possesses any—he flings his paper damp from the press at the heads of the public and is off pursuing fresh quarry. He is a machine—but of admirable efficiency—that threshes the chaff from the million happenings of the day, and delivers the wheat to those who would flounder helplessly among the piled sheaves if left to themselves.