A new serial yarn by Besant and Rice is entitled, All Sorts and Conditions of Men. The plot is probably worked out in the caucus room of a delegates convention.
“Man Reading,” a picture by Meissonier, has been sold for $10,000. It was cheap as dirt. The man reading was an editor with a contribution written on both sides of the paper, and spontaneously interlined besides.
Our agricultural contemporary, the Herald, has a learned and highly interesting article on “Our Codfish Culture.” We trust it may be followed by another, equally able, on “Our Goat Fisheries.” Both are subjects of intense and universal concern.
WILLIAM A. WILKINS.
A country newspaper rarely makes its mark in the journalistic world, and especially a paper printed in such an obscure village as is Whitehall, New York. The Whitehall Times, however, is one of the few exceptions, and, although a country newspaper, has been quoted in every paper of any note in the land.
William Albert Wilkins, the editor and proprietor of the Times, and the one man who has made that journal famous, was born on the 26th day of March, 1840, in the village of Cherry Valley, Otsego county, New York. At the age of ten he removed with his parents to Cohoes, in the same State, where he attended a common district school for several years. He entered business as office boy in the village post-office. From this position he was elevated to a travelling salesman, doing business for a firm in Albany. A year later, however, he settled down to real life as a retail clothing merchant at Whitehall. In this pursuit Wilkins was quite successful, and for eleven years he continued in the business.
Wilkins says that the first important discovery of his life was when he embarked in the printing business. “Then,” says he, “it was easier to convince nine-tenths of the human family that the inhabitants of the infernal regions employ their time skating on real ice ponds, than it is to convince them that they cannot conduct a live newspaper. While a merchant in the town of Whitehall, Mr. Wilkins began writing—along in the fall of 1869—several humorous communications for the Weekly Times, the very paper which he afterwards owned. His articles were signed “Hiram Green, esquire, Lait justiss of the Peece.” His sketches were bright and original, and after doing all he could to supply the crusty Whitehallites with humor, he began a series of letters in the Troy Budget, which he continued for several years.
In 1870 what appeared as his guiding star shone over his horizon. A new comic weekly paper had just been introduced to the residents of New York. It was known as Punchinello, and its publisher made William Albert Wilkins, of Whitehall, a handsome offer to assume the editorial chair. Wilkins was not long in making a decision whether to accept the offer or no. In an evil moment he bade good-bye to the clothing business and hied himself to New York. His salary and the paper ended their existence in five months’ time, and the Whitehall merchant was cast adrift in the great metropolis. He remained in New York and was employed with a leading wholesale clothing house until April, 1873. During his sojourn in the city he wrote regularly for the Tribune, Sun, and Mail, as well as doing occasional work for the Brooklyn Eagle, Albany Argus, and several of the many weekly journals published in Gotham.
In the early May days of 1874 Wilkins returned to Whitehall, and his first love, the Times, became his property. Since that time he has been its editor and proprietor, and has made for it a name that takes first rank among the newspapers of America made famous by their humorous paragraphs.