‘Au revoir, then, dear Miss Gaisford,’ said her ladyship in her most affable tones.
‘Au revoir, au revoir.’
As the three went sauntering away, the vicar lagging a little behind the others, Miss Pen heard the doctor say: ‘You know the song, Lady Renshaw, When I view those Scenes so charming,’ after which nothing but a murmur reached her ears.
She turned away with a little laugh. ‘The doctor will fool her to the top of her bent. Who would have thought that high-dried piece of buckram had so much quiet fun in him?—And now to look after my hampers. If I trust to the servants, by luncheon-time the ice, like Niobe, will have wept itself away, the corkscrew will have taken a ramble on its own account, the vinegar and salt will have gone into housekeeping together, and the mustard will be making love to the blanc-mange. My reputation is at stake.’
AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS ON THEMSELVES.
It has been fairly proved in previous numbers of this Journal that so long as advertising continues, a newspaper can rarely be altogether dull, for the curiosities of the advertisement columns often exhibit strange freaks and fancies of human nature, which may afford amusement when the news columns are at their grimmest and dreariest. But the place of all others which may be regarded as the headquarters of the advertising genius is the land across the Atlantic, and the papers which are the medium of the greatest enterprise in this line are the Tribunes and Suns of the United States; and most entertaining of all are the announcements by which the American journals draw attention to their own brilliant pages. An English newspaper directory is not very attractive, except to the business portion of the community; but an American publication of the kind is of a much more amusing character; and in two bulky and comprehensive volumes, an indomitable transatlantic publisher has issued a universal gazetteer, wherein the newspapers of every part of the globe may be studied.
In the first place, it is enough for an English paper, as a rule, to state the town and county it represents; but young America must do more than this, if readers outside her various regions are to estimate the value of her press. Jacksonville or Euteroga must be set forth as indisputably the most thriving city in the richest district of the most prosperous State. Magnolia, advertisers are ‘notified,’ is a ‘flourishing town with more than twenty-five business-houses;’ Augusta ‘is growing and has a bright future;’ Westfield is ‘a thriving town of above a thousand inhabitants,’ clearly affording scope for a large circulation.
Manchester (United States), we learn, in a sentence racy of the soil, ‘is a large, live, and growing city, makes one hundred and seventy-nine miles of cloth per day, can build fifteen locomotives a month, and fifty steam fire-engines a year, and an endless variety of other products of skill and industry.’ Another rising spot has ‘fourteen grocery, three hardware, and five dry goods stores, four tailor-shops, six butcher-shops, two banks, four hotels, three grist-mills, two stave-factories, foundry, planing-mills, &c., and six churches, one of which cost about sixteen thousand dollars, and has a spire one hundred and forty-eight feet high.’ But this edifice is outdone in a third town which ‘points with just pride to its magnificent iron bridge, costing over forty thousand dollars, and other evidences of public enterprise.’ Middle Loup Valley is, we are told, ‘one of the largest and most productive valleys in the State, which is from its picturesque scenery and fertility of soil poetically called the “Rhine of America.”’ Another touch of poetry is come across unexpectedly: ‘A belt of fire from thousands of coke ovens surrounds Mount Pleasant, the centre of the great Connellsville Coke County, and the place where the Times and Mining Journal is published;’ and there is a rhythmical swing about the remark that the Honey Grove Independent ‘is published in the land where cotton grows rank and tall, and where cattle grow fat in the wild prairies.’ But Honey Grove with its cattle is nothing to Hancock County, where ‘the people have become so corpulent, that the druggists are all becoming independently rich from the sale of Allen’s Anti-Fat;’ and the Blue Grass Valley of Kentucky ‘is famous all over the world for its handsome women, thoroughbred horses, rich soil, and fine climate.’
To be worthy of a land like this, the newspapers also possess rare attractions for readers and advertisers, the latter especially. They are ‘alive and growing’ ‘newsy! pithy! spicy!’ one is a ‘paper for all mankind,’ another ‘overflows with local gossip,’ and a third ‘discusses public questions with lively respectability, and feeds its readers with no less than four and often five columns of spicy local matter each week;’ a fourth has ‘everything first-class;’ you can get ‘a bright and newsy wide-awake local paper,’ or ‘a live thirty-two column weekly;’ and the Eaton Rapids Journal will be found, appropriately to its name, ‘a live paper in a live town.’ Yet more richly descriptive is the account of the ‘red-hot local paper that feeds twenty thousand people every week and makes them fat; advertisements can reach millions of hungry minds through this medium.’ Again, we learn that ‘Life on the ocean wave is nothing compared with reading the Plymouth Pantograph.’ The Sacramento Bee is ‘the spiciest, ablest, most brilliant, and most independent journal published on the Pacific coast;’ while for ‘talking large,’ honourable mention should also be accorded to one of Cincinnati’s lights, which is ‘the best paper ever published. All its news is first-hand from upwards of fifteen hundred reporters and correspondents in every part of the United States and Europe.’
But these are mere outward characteristics and generalisations. Politics denote more distinctly the paper’s line of action, whether ‘stalwart Republican,’ ‘sound Democratic,’ or ‘Independent in all things, neutral in nothing.’ Independence is the cry of many; they are ‘bold and fearless,’ express a hatred of party, rings and ringsters. ‘Now in its third volume,’ exults one banner of freedom, ‘and has never halted by the way nor wearied of the fight. Always ready to take up the cause of the poor and oppressed, and never ready to surrender its independence to party, clique, or ring.’ ‘Has no axe to grind other than the advancement of every social reform,’ a second patriot proclaims. ‘Therefore it hits a head whenever that head is seen in opposition to true advancement.’ For the extremes of party violence we must go to a Southern journal, which does not, it may well be hoped, ‘speak as the masses of our people feel and talk;’ if it does, so much the worse for the people. ‘If the Yankees,’ this rodomontade begins, ‘want to know the real sentiments of our people; if they want to have a realising sense of the utter madness of trying to govern the grand old sovereign States of the Confederacy, they will close their ears to the lying professions of our policy-bumming politicians and subscribe to the Bartlett News.’ Perhaps some such rant as that of the Bartlett News a certain Labor Standard had in view while stating itself to be ‘not a blowing, blustering, black-mail sheet which has to be read in private because its contents are unfit to be seen in the family,’ but ‘a clean live weekly paper, devoted entirely to the interests of the working-classes.’