o know anything in order to edit a newspaper. You turnip!
Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a
parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know
just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no
more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up
the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest
opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticise the
Indian campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a warwhoop from a
wigwam, and who never have had to run a foot-race with a tomahawk,
or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to
build the evening campfire with. Who write the temperance appeals,
and clamor about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never draw
another sober breath till they do it in the grave. Who edit the
agricultural papers, you--yam? Men, as a general thing, who fail in
the poetry line, yellow-colored novel line, sensation-drama line,
city-editor line, and finally fall back on agriculture as a
temporary reprieve from the poor-house. _You_ try to tell _me_
anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it
from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the
bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.
Heaven knows if I had but been ignorant instead of cultivated, and
impudent instead of diffident, I could have made a name for myself
in this cold selfish world. I take my leave, sir. Since I have been
treated as you have treated me, I am perfectly willing to go. But I
have done my duty. I have fulfilled my contract as far as I was
permitted to do it. I said I could make your paper of interest to
all classes--and I have. I said I could run your circulation up to
twenty thousand copies, and if I had had two more weeks I'd have
done it. And I'd have given you the best class of readers that ever
an agricultural paper had--not a farmer in it, nor a solitary
individual who could tell a watermelon-tree from a peach-vine to
save his life. _You_ are the loser by this rupture, not me,
Pie-plant. Adios."

I then left.

The Killing of Julius Caesar "Localized"

_Being the only true and reliable account ever published; taken from
the "Roman Daily Evening Fasces," of the date of that tremendous
occurrence._

Nothing in the world affords a newspaper reporter so much
satisfaction as gathering up the details of a bloody and mysterious
murder, a