istressing accident"? Considering the elaborate
circumstantiality of detail observable in the item, it seems to me
that it ought to contain more information than it does. On the
contrary, it is obscure--and not only obscure, but utterly
incomprehensible. Was the breaking of Mr. Schuyler's leg, fifteen
years ago, the "distressing accident" that plunged Mr. Bloke into
unspeakable grief, and caused him to come up here at dead of night
and stop our press to acquaint the world with the circumstance? Or
did the "distressing accident" consist in the destruction of
Schuyler's mother-in-law's property in early times? Or did it consist
in the death of that person herself three years ago (albeit it does
not appear that she died by accident)? In a word, what _did_ that
"distressing accident" consist in? What did that drivelling ass of a
Schuyler stand _in the wake_ of a runaway horse for, with his
shouting and gesticulating, if he wanted to stop him? And how the
mischief could he get run over by a horse that had already passed
beyond him? And what are we to take "warning" by? And how is this
extraordinary chapter of incomprehensibilities going to be a "lesson"
to us? And, above all, what has the intoxicating "bowl" got to do
with it, anyhow? It is not stated that Schuyler drank, or that his
wife drank, or that his mother-in-law drank, or that the horse
drank--wherefore, then, the reference to the intoxicating bowl? It
does seem to me that if Mr. Bloke had let the intoxicating bowl alone
himself, he never would have got into so much trouble about this
exasperating imaginary accident. I have read this absurd item over
and over again, with all its insinuating plausibility, until my head
swims, but I can make neither head nor tail of it. There certainly
seems to have been an accident of some kind or other, but it is
impossible to determine what the nature of it was, or who was the
sufferer by it. I do not like to do it, but I feel compelled to
request that the next time anything happens to one of Mr. Bloke's
friends, he will append such explanatory notes to his account of it
as will enable me to find out what sort of an accident it was and whom
it happened to. I had rather all his friends should die than that I
should be driven to the verge of lunacy again in trying to cipher out
the meaning of another such production as the above.

[Illustration: "I HAVE READ THIS ABSURD ITEM OVER"]

How I Edited an Agricultural Paper

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