w of life. Some of these
itinerant writing craftsmen had professional fame. There was Peter B.
Lee, who had tramped the country over, who knew Greeley and Dana and
Prentice and Bob Burdett and Henry Watterson, and to whom the cub in
country offices looked with worshipful eyes. There was "Old Slugs"--the
printer who carried his moulds for making lead slugs, and who, under the
influence of improper stimulants, could recite stirring scenes from the
tragedies of Shakespeare. There was Buzby--old Buzby, who went about
from office to office leaving his obituary set up by his own hand,
conveying the impression that at last the end had come to a misspent
life. Then there was J. N. Free--the "Immortal J. N.," as he called
himself, a gaunt, cadaverous figure in broad hat and linen duster, with
hair flowing over his shoulders, who stalked into the offices at
unseemly hours to "raise the veil" of ignorance and error, and "relieve
the pressure" of psychic congestion in a town by turning upon it the
batteries of his mind.

They were a dear lot of old souls out of accord with the world about
them, ever seeking the place where they would harmonise. They might have
stepped out of Dickens's books or Cruikshank's pictures, and, when one
recalls them now, their lineaments seem out of drawing and impossible in
the modern world. And yet they did live and move in the world that was,
and the other day when we were looking over the files we came across the
work of Simon Mehronay,--the name which he said was spelled Dutch and
sounded Irish,--and it does not seem fair to set down the stories of the
others who have made our office traditions without giving some account
of him.

For to us he was the most precious of all the old tribe of journalistic
aborigines. He came to the office one bright April day with red mud on
his shoes that was not the mud of our river bottoms, and we knew that he
had ridden to town "blind baggage"--as they say of men who steal their
way--from the South. The season was ripe for the birds to come North and
it was the mud of Texas that clung to him. His greeting as he strode
through the front room not waiting for a reply was "How's work?" And
when the foreman told him to hang up his coat, he found a stick, got a
"chunk of copy," and was clicking away at his case three minutes from
the time he darkened the threshold of the office.

There he sat for two weeks--the first man down in the morning and the
last to quit at night