book! Fancy what a library an editor's
work would make, after twenty or thirty years' service. Yet people often
marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas, etc., have been able to
produce so many books. If these authors had wrought as voluminously as
newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed.
How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting
consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere
mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year
after year, is incomprehensible. Preachers take two months' holiday in
midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing,
in the long run. In truth it must be so, and is so; and therefore, how
an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build upon them from ten
to twenty painstaking editorials a week and keep it up all the year
round, is farther beyond comprehension than ever. Ever since I survived
my week as editor, I have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper
that comes to my hand; it is in admiring the long columns of editorial,
and wondering to myself how in the mischief he did it!

Mr. Goodman's return relieved me of employment, unless I chose to become
a reporter again. I could not do that; I could not serve in the ranks
after being General of the army. So I thought I would depart and go
abroad into the world somewhere. Just at this juncture, Dan, my
associate in the reportorial department, told me, casually, that two
citizens had been trying to persuade him to go with them to New York and
aid in selling a rich silver mine which they had discovered and secured
in a new mining district in our neighborhood. He said they offered to
pay his expenses and give him one third of the proceeds of the sale.
He had refused to go. It was the very opportunity I wanted. I abused
him for keeping so quiet about it, and not mentioning it sooner. He said
it had not occurred to him that I would like to go, and so he had
recommended them to apply to Marshall, the reporter of the other paper.
I asked Dan if it was a good, honest mine, and no swindle. He said the
men had shown him nine tons of the rock, which they had got out to take
to New York, and he could cheerfully say that he had seen but little rock
in Nevada that was richer; and moreover, he said that they had secured a
tract of valuable timber and a mill-site, near the mine. My first idea
was to kill Dan. But I