mper
through the dictionary.

How sedate and prosperous Springfield looked to me when I arrived there
on an early spring day! How clean, orderly, leisurely, and respectable
after the untidiness and explosive anarchy of New York! I made for the
river, as I always do wherever a river is, and watched it flowing down
in the silver-gray light and catching bits of the rain-washed blue sky.
The trees had lost the brittleness and sharpness of winter's drawing
and their outlines were softening into greenish velvet. In the
coverts, arbutus crept out with a hawthorn-like fragrance from patches
of lingering snow. The main street leading into the town from the
Massasoit House and the station also had an air of repose and dignity
as if those who had business in it were not preoccupied by the frenzy
for bargains, but had time and the inclination for loitering,
politeness, and sociability. That was in 1870, and I fear that
Springfield must have lost some of its old-world simplicity and
leisureliness since then. I regret that I have never been in it since,
though I have passed through it hundreds of times.

The office of the Republican was in keeping with its environment, an
edifice of stone or brick not more than three or four stories high,
neat, uncrowded, and quiet; very different from the newspaper offices
of Park Row, with their hustle, litter, dust, and noise. I met no one
on my way upstairs to the editorial rooms, and quaked at the oppressive
solemnity and detachment of it. I wondered if people were observing me
from the street and thought how much impressed they would be if they
divined the importance of the person they were looking at, possibly
another Tom Tower. The vanity of youth is in the same measure as its
valour; withdraw one, and the other droops.

"Now," said Mr. Bowles sharply, after a brusque greeting, "we'll see
what you can do."

I was dubious of him in that first encounter. He was crisp and quick
in manner, clear-skinned, very spruce, and clear-eyed; his eyes
appraised you in a glance.

"Take that and see how short you can make it."

He handed me a column from one of the "exchanges," as the copies of
other papers are called. I spent half an hour at it, striking out
repetitions and superfluous adjectives and knitting long sentences into
brief ones. Condensation is a fine thing, as Charles Reade once said,
and to know how to condense judiciously, to get all the juice, without
any of the rind or p