They are a disgrace to journalism. Why, what put it into your head that you could edit a paper of this nature. You do not seem to know the first rudiments of agriculture. You speak of a furrow and a harrow as being the same thing; you talk of the moulting season for cows; and you recommend the domestication of the pole-cat on account of its playfulness and its excellence as a ratter? Your remark that clams will lie quiet if music be played to them was superfluous entirely superfluous. Nothing disturbs. clams. Clams always lie quiet. Clams care nothing whatever about music. Ah, heavens and earth, friend! if you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day. I never saw anything like it. Your observation that the horse-chestnut as an article of commerce is steadily gaining in favor, is simply calculated to destroy this journal. I want you to throw up your situation and go. I want no more holiday-I could not enjoy it if I had it. Certainly not with you in my chair. I would always stand in dread of what you might be going to recommend next. It makes me lose all patience every time I think of your discussing oyster-beds under the head of "Landscape Gardening." I want you to go. Nothing on earth could persuade me to take another holiday. Oh! why didn't you tell me you didn't know anything about agriculture?" "Tell you, you cornstalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower? It's the first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark. I tell you I have been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man's having to 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 war-whoop from a wigwam, and who never have had to run a footrace with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire 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-covered 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 diffi dent, 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 water-melon tree from a peach-vine to save his life. You are the loser by this rupture, not me, Pie-plant! Adios." I then left. OUR acknowledgments are due to the following authors and publishers for permission granted to use the material contained in this book: A PLEASURE EXERTION... 66 ...... COLONEL SELLERS AT HOME... EUROPEAN DIET.. Josiah Allen's Wife.. by Marietta Holley. D. APPLETON & CO., 5 BOND STREET, NEW YORK CITY. TUSHMAKER'S TOOTHPULLER..from Phanixiana...... ..by John Phoenix. 16 66 66 46 64 46 .... ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPERS.... PHOENIX AT SEA.. LECTURES ON ASTRONOMY..... A NEW SYSTEM OF GRAMMAR.. JOHN PHOENIX Renders an Ac- THE SEWING-MACHINE TACHMENT. AT BELFORD, CLARKE & CO., STATE STREET, CHICAGO, ILL. azine .......by Mary Mapes Dodge. G. W. DILLINGHAM & CO., NEW YORK CITY. DICK & FITZGERALD, NEW YORK CITY. SICILY BURNS'S WEDDING ...from Sut Lovingood's Yarns, by Geo. W. Harris. HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE, NEW YORK CITY. COL. GRICE'S EXPENSIVE TREAT. from Dukesborough Tales.by R. M. Johnston, REV. CREAMCHEESE AND THE NEW LIVERY. 66 Potiphar Papers....by Geo. Wm. Curtis. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., 4 PARK STREET, BOSTON, MASS. from Atlantic Monthly....by Mrs. Francis Lee CAPT. BEN'S CHOICE.. THE FRIEND OF MY YOUTH... "Atlantic Monthly...... |