It was only last week that Hedrick was in our office telling us of Handy's "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." He paused when he had finished the story, cocked his head on one side, and squinted at the ceiling as he said:
"For three long, weary, fruitless years I've searched the drug-stores of this town for the brand of liquor Ab had that day. I believe if I had two drinks of that I could write better poetry than old Browning himself."
Whereupon Hedrick shook himself out of the office in a gentle wheesy laugh.
XVII
The Tremolo Stop
Our business has changed greatly since Horace Greeley's day. And, although machines have come into little offices like ours, the greatest changes have come in the men who do the work in these offices. In the old days—the days before the great war and after it—printers and editors were rarely leading citizens in the community. The editor and the printer were just coming out of the wandering minstrel stage of social development, and the journeyman who went from town to town seeking work, and increasing his skill, was an important factor in the craft. One might always depend upon a tramp printer's coming in when there was a rush of work in the office, and also figure on one of the tourists in the office leaving when he was needed most.
From the ranks of this wayward class came the old editors and reporters; they were postgraduates from the back room of newspaper offices and they brought to the front room their easy view of life. Some of these itinerant writing craftsmen had professional fame. There was Peter B. Lee, who had tramped the country over, who knew Greeley and Dana and Prentice and Bob Burdett and Henry Watterson, and to whom the cub in country offices looked with worshipful eyes. There was "Old Slugs"—the printer who carried his moulds for making lead slugs, and who, under the influence of improper stimulants, could recite stirring scenes from the tragedies of Shakespeare. There was Buzby—old Buzby, who went about from office to office leaving his obituary set up by his own hand, conveying the impression that at last the end had come to a misspent life. Then there was J. N. Free—the "Immortal J. N.," as he called himself, a gaunt, cadaverous figure in broad hat and linen duster, with hair flowing over his shoulders, who stalked into the offices at unseemly hours to "raise the veil" of ignorance and error, and "relieve the pressure" of psychic congestion in a town by turning upon it the batteries of his mind.
They were a dear lot of old souls out of accord with the world about them, ever seeking the place where they would harmonise. They might have stepped out of Dickens's books or Cruikshank's pictures, and, when one recalls them now, their lineaments seem out of drawing and impossible in the modern world. And yet they did live and move in the world that was, and the other day when we were looking over the files we came across the work of Simon Mehronay,—the name which he said was spelled Dutch and sounded Irish,—and it does not seem fair to set down the stories of the others who have made our office traditions without giving some account of him.
For to us he was the most precious of all the old tribe of journalistic aborigines. He came to the office one bright April day with red mud on his shoes that was not the mud of our river bottoms, and we knew that he had ridden to town "blind baggage"—as they say of men who steal their way—from the South. The season was ripe for the birds to come North and it was the mud of Texas that clung to him. His greeting as he strode through the front room not waiting for a reply was "How's work?" And when the foreman told him to hang up his coat, he found a stick, got a "chunk of copy," and was clicking away at his case three minutes from the time he darkened the threshold of the office.