r" that circulation had a real impetus. We
have never had a boom in subscription that did not begin with a lot of
angry citizens coming in to stop the paper. It became known about town
who wrote the Keene article, and Mehronay became in a small way a public
character. We encouraged him to write more, so every morning the first
proof slips that came in began to have on them ten or a dozen short
items of Mehronay's writing. There was a smile in every one of them, and
if he wrote more than ten lines there was a laugh. It was Mehronay who
referred to Huddleson's livery-stable joint--where the old soaks got
their beer in a stall and salted it from the feed-box--as "a gilded
palace of sin." It was Mehronay who wrote the advertisement of the
Chinese laundryman and signed his name "Fat Sam Child of the Sun,
Brother of the Moon and Second Cousin by marriage to all the Stars." It
was Mehronay who took a galley of pi which the office devil had set up
from a wrecked form, and interspersed up and down the column of
meaningless letters "Great applause"--"Tremendous cheering"--Cries of
"Good, good!--that's the way to hit 'em!"--"Hurrah for Hancock"--and ran
it in the paper as a report of Carl Schurz's speech to the
German-American League at the court-house. It was Mehronay who put the
advertisement in the paper proclaiming the fact that General Durham of
the _Statesman_ office desired to purchase a good second-hand fiddle,
and explaining that the owner must play five tunes on it in front of the
_Statesman_ office door before bringing it in. Mehronay originated the
fiction that there was an association in town formed to insure its
members against wedding invitations which, in case of loss, paid the
afflicted member a pickle dish or a napkin ring, to present as his
offering to the bride.

Mehronay started a mythical Widowers' Protective Foot-racing Society,
and the town had great sport with the old boys whose names he used so
wittily that it transcended impudence. Mehronay got up a long list of
husbands who wiped dishes when the family was "out of a girl," as our
people say, and organised them into a union to strike for their altars
and their kitchen fires. When we sent him out to write up a fire,
however, he generally forgot the amount of insurance and the extent of
the loss, but he told all about the way the crowd tried to boss the fire
department; and if we sent him out to gather the local markets, he made
such a mess of it that we w