“I do not intend to retire from business for some time. The newspaper business is easy, and especially easy is the task of running the funny end of it. A fellow has merely to be funny when he feels sad, and to grind out humorous items every day in the year. Then the salary of newspaper men is so enormous that college graduates would rather take a situation on a newspaper than get a job driving a street car. I am still grinding out mental pabulum for the public, and still waiting for some appreciative newspaper publisher to offer me a situation at $5,000 per annum.
W. W. Clark.”
IRWIN RUSSELL.
The night before Christmas, 1879, witnessed the death of one of the brightest young humorists the United States has ever called her own. Of bright intellect and finished education, Irwin Russell was rapidly winning a name in American literature, when taken ill, as the result of overwork; he lingered a few days, and died Christmas Eve.
Little is known of the early days of Irwin Russell. He was born in Fort Gibson, and at an early age was left an orphan, relying on his own exertions for a livelihood. He studied law and began the practice of it in his native city, but, becoming enamored with the life of a Bohemian, he started for New Orleans in search of fame and fortune. He obtained employment at local writing in various newspaper offices, and finally found regular employment in the editorial rooms of the New Orleans Times. Then he left the South and turned up in New York city, where he struggled with fate for a time. His existence was a battle with necessity from the first. It seemed that he was born unlucky. Although his prospects were always fine, he never lived to establish himself permanently anywhere. Few men ever received so many buffets from the hand of fate.
Alone and friendless in New York, young and ambitious, yet weak and moneyless, success and he were strangers. The health of the poor boy failed him, and he would have died had he remained in New York. He shipped on board of a steamer bound for the gulf, and worked his way home—not home, for he had none, but to New Orleans, where he had, at least, a few friends among the journalists of that city. He returned to work upon the Times, and published some of the daintiest bits of dialect humor ever given to the public.
By a strange coincidence his last published lines were written upon the subject of his own grave. They appeared in the New Orleans Times, December 14th, just ten days before the author gave up the struggle with fate and died.
THE CEMETERY.
“I stand within this solemn place,