AN ELECTION STORY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1291, 26 November 1896, Page 10

AN ELECTION STORY.

A good election story is told by an American journalist in a book just published. He writes :—" I was going to a dinner I wouldn't have liked to miss, and on the very night of the dinner, our working chief fell ill, so thit I had to bring out the paper single-handed, just at tl o crisis of a presidential elect'on too. Of course, I couldn't leave the office till the numbeis were announced. I'd made up my mind how the election would go, and I wrote a triumphant column sayinc my man was elected by a big majority, and had it screwed into the press ready for when the news came. I wroteanother paragraph saying that the other man had got in and that everyone was a fool, just in cast» of emergency. Then I sent for my trapes and dressed, and sat with my ear to the telephone bell, waiting for the Hews, and hoping that if I was late they'd wait dinner for me ; and I never noticed the hum-humming of the machines at work in the basement. And presently I heard a crowd shouting in the street below, and went to the window, and there was our late edition pouring out through the slide into the street and the newsboys catching them and doing a splendid trade, while the opposition paper over the way stuck up great placards in all their windows with * The Express is printing a lie,' in letters a foot long. " The printers hadn't understood my orders. I flew down to the engine-room to stop the press, and there was the proprietor raging round the place, screaming curses, and the invalid editor wrapped up in blankets, cursing faintly, but much worse ; and 1 joined in—l'm not sure | didn't beat them both. JNo one baa thought of stopping the press, and the telephone bell upstairs began to ring like mad, and a messenger to yell downstairs for the sub-editor—that was mo. And when I went upstairs, there was my man elected right enough. I wrote out my resignation, and took it to the chief, but he was drinking a whisky and-soda by then t and ju3t said, 'Don't be a foul, Anthony ; brush that white-wash off your ooat.' The paper opposite was a triftu hard on me the next day, and wrote sa,seistic paragraphs about a slim dude in, fcbe Express office, who was writing love verses when he ought to h.aYQ beea, watching the printers." ' 14 But my editor retaliated by an arfic'e saying, 4 i| he had a man in his office cle.vet enough to know what was going tw> happen half-an-hour before the event, it was no wonder less enterprising papers feU spiteful,' and raised me SOOt dollars,, That's American Journalism,.''" The book from whiob this anecdote is quoted is called u TUe Story of a Fool and His Folly.* It is from the pen of Yynue, and forms one of the twoshUUng volumes of " Hutchinson's Leisure Library."