On his oculary squinter.
Or this:
We desire to announce that Mademoiselle Rhea, the gifted Flanders maid, who has the finest wardrobe on the stage, will play a season of bad brogue and flash dresses in this city very soon. This announcement, however, will never see the dawn of November 13th, and we kiss it a fond farewell as we cheerfully submit it as a sop to Cerberus.
Field had a theory that Ballantyne, the managing editor, would not consider that he was earning his salary, and that Mr. Stone would not think that he was exercising the full authority of editorship, unless something in his column was sacrificed to the blue pencil of a watchful censorship. Coupled with this was the more or less cunning belief that it was good tactics to write one or two outrageously unprintable paragraphs to draw the fire, so to speak, of the blue pencil, and so to divert attention from something, about which there might be question, which he particularly wished to have printed. Ballantyne, as I have said, was a very much more exacting censor than Stone, for the reason that the humor of a story or paragraph often missed his Scotch literalness, while Stone never failed to let anything pass on that score.
By six o'clock Field's writing for the day was done, and he generally went home for dinner. But that this was not always the case the following notes testify:
GOOD AND GENTLE KNIGHT:
If so be ye pine and so hanker after me this night I pray you come anon to the secret lair near the moat on the next floor, and there you will eke descry me. There we will discourse on love and other joyous matters, and until then I shall be, as I have ever been,
Your most courteous friend,
E. FIELD.