sque, none, at least in America, more capable of fictitious
illustration. Around a newspaper all the dramatis personae of the world
congregate; within it there are staid idiosyncratic folk who admit of
all kindly caricature.

I summon from that humming and hurly-burly past, the ancient
proof-reader. He wears a green shade over his eyes and the gas burner is
drawn very low to darken the bald and wrinkled contour of his forehead.
He is severe in judgment and spells rigidly by the Johnsonian standard.
He punctuates by an obdurate and conscientious method, and will have no
italics upon any pretext. He will lend you money, will eat with you,
drink with you, and encourage you; but he will not punctuate with you,
spell with you, nor accept any of your suggestions as to typography or
paragraphing whatsoever. He wears slippers and smokes a primitive clay
pipe; he has everything in its place, and you cannot offend him more
than by looking over any proof except when he is holding it. A chip of
himself is the copyholder at his side,--a meagre, freckled, matter of
fact youth, who reads your tenderest sentences in a rapid monotone, and
is never known to venture any opinion or suggestion whatever. This boy,
I am bound to say, will follow the copy if it be all consonants, and
will accompany it if it flies out of the window.

The office clerk was my bane and admiration. He was presumed by the
verdant patrons of the paper to be its owner and principal editor, its
type-setter, pressman, and carrier. His hair was elaborately curled, and
his ears were perfect racks of long and dandyfied pens; a broad,
shovel-shaped gold pen lay forever opposite his high stool; he had an
arrogant and patronizing address, and was the perpetual cabbager of
editorial perquisites. Books, ball-tickets, season-tickets, pictures,
disappeared in his indiscriminate fist, and he promised notices which he
could not write to no end of applicants. He was to be seen at the
theatre every night, and he was the dashing escort of the proprietor's
wife, who preferred his jaunty coat and highly-polished boots to the
less elaborate wardrobe of us writers. That this noble and fashionable
creature could descend to writing wrappers, and to waiting his turn with
a bank-book in the long train of a sordid teller, passed all speculation
and astonishment. He made a sorry fag of the office boy, and advised us
every day to beware of cutting the files, as if that were the one vice
of auth