QUIPS AND CRANKS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 843, 27 April 1888, Page 7

QUIPS AND CRANKS.

THE YOUNG EDITOR’S VALEDICTORY. A LITTLE FROZEN TRUTH. In 1579 a young man named Lawler came out to the city of Roaring Spring (since extinct) and started The Roaring Spring Examiner. He, following the usual custom, boomed everything in sight, beside a good many invisible things, endangered his chances of salvation a dozen times in every issue by his disregard for the truth in referring to hi 3 fellow citizens, and made a paper generally which they ought to have appreciated, but didn’t. He struggled for a year and decided to give it up, especially as a mortgage was being foreclosed on his type and presses as fa3t, or a little faster, than the law allowed. Below is an extract from hi 3 valedictory, he walking out of town the night before it appeared and leaving direc. tions for the boy to put tho papers in the post office box next morning : ‘We have worked pretty hard to please the moss-backs and javvhawkers living in Roaring' Spring, but it seems they don’t want to be pleased.

‘We referred to the Western Hotel as "sumptuous and elegant in all its appointments.” the same week we wore carried out of its dining-room insensible under the influence of its lOth-rate canned goods and poisonous coffee. ‘We have spoken of old man Wilkin as our "efficient and scholarly Justice of the Peace,” while at the very time we were writing the words the old soaker was under our office drunk and bumping his head up against the floor, having crawled there under the impression that he was going to bed in a sleeping-car moving forty miles an hour.

‘We have lied about the prospect for a railroad coming here when wo knew there were more chances that Noah’s ark would sail through town than that a train of cars would ever get within hearing distance.

‘We have howled about the astonishing fertility of the soil near Roaring Spring in the same issue that we should have recorded the fact that the only man who ever took the Examiner and paid for it had just starved out trying to raise hen grasß. ‘We wrote a glowing account of a visit to our ‘well-built and commodious Court House,’ when the truth i 3 that a stray cow came out of the front door of it and tried to hook us over the fence when we first went up to it. *We noticed the “cause for pardonable pride which we had in the fine condition of our streets ” the same day we had a good pair of boots pulled off by the mud while going to the post office. ‘ Wo grew really eloquent over the “ splendid opportunities that exist here for settlers,” when we knew that the only settler who arrived here thi3 summer was promptly run into a saloon and cleaned out of his money in a poker game by Bill Kuhn, Town Clerk, and Dan Wooly, County Commissioner. ‘We told of our ‘‘sparkling drinking water, cool and delicious to the taste,’ when we knew that there was so much alkali in it that in washing our type with it, it had actually eaten the tails off the very commas we punctuated the statement with. ‘ We spoke of our winter climate as being *•* clear and dry, rendering it quite impossible to feel cold,’ when only a month before the Doctor .had amputated two of our toes where we had inadvertently got our foot over a rat hole in the floor while eating

supper. ‘ We found time to write a lengthy article on our “ beautiful spring weather, with gus.t enough breeze to purify the air and make it healthful,’ even if we were .kept pretty busy that week in sorting our type, which had been pied by the office being blown away and scattered over half the country. ‘ The week we were sunstruok we wrote a poem on ‘‘Beautiful Summer and Roaring Spring when Judge of Probate Dougherty had the jimjams and set the school house afire in the night, we laid it to the “ diabolical work of some villainous tramps ” j when Nick Daggett and his wife tried to poison each other we shouted about the arsenic in the wall paper ; the Packard family froze to

death in a blizzard and we wept over the fact that consumption should thus enter a family without warning and sweep away a whole household j a cyclone killed Bix and we sobbed over that “ fell destroyer, epileptic fits, contracted in the army ” ; drinking alkali water hurried a dozen to an untimely grave, and in every case we bowed our head and through our sobs moaned out, "Another good citizen killed in a runaway !” That’s the way we’ve been standing up for you, but we are going to stop. This is the last Examiner. If the few remaining dead beats in Roaring Spring will this evening cast their eyes through the gathering darkness, they will see a tall, brainy young man, formerly engaged in the newspaper business in their midst, pass out from them, through the gloaming on the trot. Good-bye. It is our earnest hope that we may not meet on a better shore; we couldn’t meet on a worse one.'—Fred. Carruth in Chicago Tribune.