The title chosen, as you see, was the “Tri-Weekly Chichagoff Decade.”
“Why ‘Tri-Weekly’?” asked Pet and Mr. Percival together.
“Because,” replied Mr. Selborne, in his gravest tones, “it has greatly interested your editor to see you all try weakly to produce”—
The rest of the sentence was drowned in a chorus of outcries and laughter.
“But,” persisted Mr. Percival, “do you expect to sail these waters again, in just ten years from now? Else, why is it the ‘Decade’?”
“Oh! that, sir, merely indicates that it is a deck aid to cheerfulness.”
Here Tom collapsed and fell over upon Randolph, murmuring that it was enough to give a weakly-chick-a-cough to hear such puns. But such ill-timed levity was promptly suppressed.
Mr. Selborne now squared his shoulders, and opened the reading with a short editorial, which he called his
SALUTATORY.
It is seldom that an editor finds himself in the position of one who greets his friends with one hand and bids them farewell with the other; who combines, as it were, his welcoming and his parting bow; who enters the room and backs out of it simultaneously; who, in short, is obliged to write at one and the same moment, his Salutatory and Valedictory.