ere sitting in judgment
on poor Red Martin, in toddled Simon Mehronay, who is visiting in town
from New York in the company of the vestal virgin who had, as he
expressed it, snatched him as a brand from the burning. Mehronay has
been gone from town nearly twenty years, and until they told him he did
not know how Red Martin had fallen. When he heard it, Mehronay sighed
and tears came into his dear old eyes, as he put his hand on Colonel
Morrison's arm and said:

"Poor Red! Poor Red! A decent, brave, big-hearted chap! Why, he's taken
whisky away from me a dozen times! He's won my money from me to keep it
over Saturday night. Why, I'm no better than he is! Only they've caught
Red, and they haven't caught me. And when we stand before the
judgment-seat, I can tell a damnsight more good things about Red than he
can about me. I'm going out to find him and get him a square meal."

And so, while we were debating, Mehronay went down the Jericho road
looking for the man who was lying there, beaten and bruised and waiting
for the Samaritan.

XIX

"Thirty"

In the afternoon, between two and three o'clock, the messenger boy from
the telegraph office brings over the final sheet of the day's report of
the Associated Press. Always at the end is the signature "Thirty." That
tells us that the report is closed for the day. Just why "Thirty" should
be used to indicate the close of the day's work no one seems to know. It
is the custom. They do so in telegraph offices all over the country, and
in the newspaper business "Thirty" stands so significantly for the end
that whenever a printer or a reporter dies his associates generally feel
called upon to have a floral emblem made with that figure in the centre.
It is therefore entirely proper that these sketches of life in a country
town, seen through a reporter's eyes, should close with that symbolic
word. But how to close? That is the question.

Sitting here by the office window, with the smell of ink in one's
nostrils, with the steady monotonous clatter of the linotypes in the
ears, and the whirring of the shafting from the press-room in the
basement throbbing through one's nerves, with the very material
realisation of the office around one; we feel that only a small part of
it, and of the life about it, has been set down in these sketches.
Passing the office window every moment is someone with a story that
should be told. Every human life, if one could know it well and
translat