e
always coming in with requests or complaints, usually the latter. First
and last there was a quantity of grinding detail which, like the
embittered old fogeyism of the Blaines College trustees, had not
appeared on his rosy prospect in the Maytime preceding.

With everything else favorable, West would cheerfully have accepted
these things, as being inextricably embedded in the nature of the work.
But unfortunately, everything else was not favorable. Deeper than the
grind of the routine detail, was the constant opposition and adverse
criticism to which his newspaper, like every other one, was incessantly
subjected. It has long been a trite observation that no reader of any
newspaper is so humble as not to be outspokenly confident that he could
run that paper a great deal better than those who actually are running
it. Every upstanding man who pays a cent for a daily journal considers
that he buys the right to abuse it, nay incurs the manly duty of abusing
it. Every editor knows that the highest praise he can expect is silence.
If his readers are pleased with his remarks, they nobly refrain from
comment. But if they disagree with one jot or tittle of his high-speed
dissertations, he must be prepared to have quarts of ink squirted at him
forthwith.

Now this was exactly the reverse of Editor West's preferences. He liked
criticism of him to be silent, and praise of him to be shouted in the
market-place. For all his good-humor and poise, the steady fire of
hostile criticism fretted him intensely. He did not like to run through
his exchanges and find his esteemed contemporaries combatting his
positions, sometimes bitterly or contemptuously, and always, so it
seemed to him, unreasonably and unfairly. He did not like to have
friends stop him on the street to ask why in the name of so-and-so he
had said such-and-such; or, more trying still, have them pass him with
an icy nod, simply because he, in some defense of truth and exploitation
of the uplift, had fearlessly trod upon their precious little toes. He
did not like to have his telephone ring with an angry protest, or to get
a curt letter from a railroad president (supposedly a good friend of the
paper's) desiring to know by return mail whether the clipping therewith
inclosed represented the _Post's_ attitude toward the railroads. A
steady procession of things like these wears on the nerves of a
sensitive man, and West, for all his confident exterior, was a sensitive
man. A