MISERIES OF AN EDITOR.

Tuapeka Times, Volume VI, Issue 274, 1 May 1873, Page 3

MISERIES OF AN EDITOR.

by^an^explosTon^of^niwo-glycerine under me. But I didn't, I simply asked, " How's that ?" "I've sold." "Sold what?" "The farm." "To whom?" "Hans?" That was the whole story. I didn't need any further explanations ;. but Simpson proceeded to say : — " You see the old farm is completely run out. I can't make the two ends meet the best of years. I've got tired of tumbling around among the stones, and I'm going where there's some virgin soil that will produce tomething. So I struck up a trade with Hans. He has been after it, off and on, for a year or more. I wanted 40dols per acre for the old place. He offered me 25d015. Finally be offered me 30dols ; and after considering the subject, I told him I would take it if he would pay me cash down. Hadn't any idea that he would do it, but he said if I would throw in the stock and and farm implements he thought he could raise the money. I finally told him I would ; and what do you think, Sir ! He hauled out of his greasy old pants pocket a 1000 dollar bill, and handed it to me to bind the bargain, and said as soon as the papers were receipted he'd pay me the balance, which he has done to-day. I feel kind o' sorry to part with the old place ; but the thing is done, and there's an end on't. What d'ye think ?" All this time my Crumple nature had been rising within me like an inspiration. Here was this man Simpson who inherited this farm — one of the finest in the neighbourhood — who had skinned it without scruple until it would scarcely raise white beans under his system of treatment. And he had got to leave, or mortgage the farm of his ancestors, to live on ! Then there was Hans, who came into the neighbourhood with his frau five years before, with only his and his wife's strong and willing hands, economy, and industry. They had rented a worn-out farm, which they bad finally purchased and paid for, and had saved 3,000 dollars with which to pay for Simpson's 100 acres. So in answer to " What d'ye think ?" I was ready to respond ; and I did in this wise ! " What do I think ? I'm glad you're going, neighbour Simpson ! I'm glad Hans has got the farm. He deserves it : you don't. He has got brains and industry; you haven't got either. Under your management the farm is a disgrace to the neighbourhood ; Hans will make it a credit. Tour farm lying next to mine, depreciates the value of my land ten per cent ; the same land owned by Hans will add to the value of mine 20 per cent. I shall be the richer for your going and the poorer for your staying. I am glad you're going !" You should have seen Simpson's and his family's faces. They grew cloudy and long. Indeed, I believe they began to scowl at me. Simpson said : "You're pretty rough on an old neighbour, Crumple, now that he's going. I thought you and I bad always been friends. I've tried to be a good and accommodating neighbour. | You've been a good one to me, and I'm sorry to leaye you ; but if you're glad I'm going, I'm not sorry either." " Simpson," I said, " let us understand each other. As a neighbour, so far as neighbourly intercourse is concerned, I've no fault to find, and I am sorry you are going. In talking about you as a farmer — you are, and always have been, a poor one. No man with such a farm as yours ought to want to sell — at least there ought to be no necessity for selling. But you are not a farmer. You haven't" got a single quality essential to make a good farmer. In the first place, you detest the business ; you don't take any pride or interest in it ; you don't care whether your land improves under cultivation or not ; you want to get all off it you can without taking the trouble to pay anything back ; yo\i skin it year after year, and cry out against the seasons ; you denounce every man you deal with as a sharper or swindler because you do not get the prices for your products other people do ; and yet you do not seem to know that the reason is that your products are poor in quality and put in the market in miserable shape : your stock has been running down ever since your father died j you haven't built a new

you know horses ; you can talk horse from daylight till dark ; you can't be fooled with horses j you like to trade in horses ; you had better go into some smart town and start a livery stable. Tou'll make money at it ; yon'll never make money farming ; you'll grow poorer and poorer the longer you attempt it." Just then Sally Simpson clapped her hands and said : — " That's so, father ! Haven't I often told yon so ? Mother and I have often talked it over, Mr. Crumple, and you are just as right as can be ; and father knows it, too, if he would only say so. I know you too well (and you've done us too many kindnesses for us ever to forget them), to believe that you have talked to father in the way you have out of any unkind feeling. It is true, every word of it, father, and you ought to' thank neighbour Crumple for talking jwst as lie ttiaks. Ido - and I don't think a bit the less of him, either !" Then Sally burst into tears, and Mrs Simpson drew a long breath and sighed in a way that endorsed all Sally had said ; and Simpson got up and came over to me and said :—: — " Crumple, I do believe you're right ; I only wish you had talked to me that style ten years sooner. It shan't make a bit of difference in our good feeling towards each other, old fellow ; and I'll never forget how you once saved my boy " " There, there ! Simpson ! enough of that. It's all right. If I can do anything for you before you go, let me know," and he shook my hand with a strong grip as I passed out of the back door.

" Snyder in the Auckland " "Weekly Herald," says : — "I shall never cease to regret, so long as I live and continue to be an insignificant unit in this sublunary sphere, the time, some years ago, I turned from a useful and respectful occupation and became a writer for a newspaper. I was pursuing the peaceful calling of a brickmaker, at which I earned a humble and contented livelihood, when in a weak moment I refused to listen to the voice of reason, and I became a newspaper editor. It was in a province in the Middle Island where I chanced to learn that the newspaper of its chief town, long and ably conducted by a respectable proprietor, had been bought up by 13 pump-politicians, who were dis satisfied with him because his editor would not advocate a measure by which the baker's dozen should alienate to themselves the whole of the lands in the province, to be bought at five and three pence per acre upon deferred payments. These men bought up the paper and then advertised for an editor. I applied. I was asked what qualifications I possessed. I told them the whole truth. I said that in my youth I had run for three different newspapers upon commission for the sale of them. That I had on another occasion been engaged to sweep out a newspaper ofiice and •carry up editors' and reporters' * copy ' to the printers ; and that possessing a quarter of an acre of clay upon lease I had turned to brick -making. I was asked what were my politics, and I said just as I make my bricks to order so would I make my politics to suit them. I was deemed admirably fitted for the duties of a newspaper editor, and received and engagement forthwith about half the rate of wages of a journeyman blacksmith. " When I had written my first leader for the following morning's issue, eight of the proprietors came down to read it before it went into type. Three approved of the sentiments expressed ; four dissented, as the eight didn't see that it had any sense in it. Within a fortnight five of the shareholders, two of whom could not spell at all and three only very little, brought up each a leader to insert in the paper. Two of these in substance were advertisements calculated to benefit the writer's business. Two were controversial on matters of a religious faith, and one recommended a petition to be drawn up to send to the English Parliament praying that the province should be placed under its control, and asking the Queen to appoint one of her sons as a resident minister, I could not convince these shareholders that such writing was not the material of which leading articles were composed

cHCr^nH*gHlllCcimiußl.B jl cVerrßau^Tir my life. The article, without the slightest circumlocution, stated that hereditary wilful murder ran in the family of a man who lived next bouse but one to him and whose wife had quarrelled with his wife. I told the writer that it would never do ; that it was libellous, and that all the shareholders would be answerable for the consequences of publishing it. He replied by saying that he didn't want them to be responsible — that he would be responsible for the consequences himself. But as no jury would have returned damages at the lowest figure under £100,000, and the individual's wealth merely consisted of a horse, a dray, and a stack of firewood, I took the grave responsibility upon myself of refusing to hand it in to the printers, by which I made one more enemy. " One shareholder after another would come and carry away my newspaper exchanges, so that I had nothing to select my reprint matter from. Another insisted that it was part of my duty to write a poem in commemoration of the birth of his first born baby. Another considered I did wrong in always putting in the latest news first, as I should keep it back until the stale news had been used up. One shareholder wanted me to publish two ! columns of the novel Monle Christo in each issue of the paper. This man was a little reasonable, for upon showing him my figures that at the rate of two columns an issue in a twice-a-week paper, the whole of the work would take eighty-four years six months and three weeks before it was finished, he expressed himself satisfied that it should not be commenced until we brought out twice a day a paper a trifle bigger than the London 'Times.' Before I could draw my salary, the cheques had to be signed by three of the shareholders, and as theße three happened to be among the very men whose editorials I had objected to have printed, I had a great amount of anxiety and trouble pefore I could obtain their signatures. And even when this was accomplished, the cheque was generally handed back bo me by the ' bank cashier with the words ' not sufficient funds' initialed on the back. J " During the eleven months and three days I remained on this paper the agonies I endured were and ever will be unspeakable. My misery was greater than I could bear. I carefully reviewed all the sins of my past life, but I felt that I had done nothing deserving such a terrible punishment. I observed that my wife pursued a strange, and for her, a very extraordinary and unusual line of behavour towards me. When at home she would never leave the room I happened to be sitting or resting in. She frequently visited my editorial office where the newspaper articles were written. There was a solicitude towards me which I never before believed she was capable of. Two years i after she divulged the secret. She had feared, she told me, through every hour of the day and night that I intended to commit suicide, and it was her duty, she considered, to exercise all her watchfulness in preventing me from perpetrating such a rash act, although she was bound to confess, she said, that I would have been perfectly justified in makiug away with myself, and that Heaven would scarcely have been sufficient compensation for the sufferings I had endured on earth. I endeavoured once more to obtain employment ai my old trade of brickmaking, but found I bad completely unfitted myself for continuous, and honest work. I would deliver eight hundred bricks and charge them as a thousand. I scorched them outside to make them look thoroughly baked through when the inside was only wet clay. I mixed gravel with the composite, and did all sorts of mean things. The feditor business had utterly demoralised me, and I felt that if I was to live I must seek employment on some newspaper."

The German equivalent of tram-car is Pierdstrassenisenbahnwagen. It is a pretty long word to look at and to write down, but Mr. John Tirnbs has unearthed a longer and prettier. This is Ticeoberappellationsgerichtsprotunotarius — only sixteen syllables. It is an official title, and means the Deputy of che Chief. Prothoivotary in the Appeals Court. The word looks imposing on the back of envelopes addressed to the gentlemen.

ency, for a still' stronger reason — one which intimately concerns the Provinces of Canterbury and Otago especially. It is this : that unless some such change as we are advocating is brought about, the burdens of the South will be enormously increased by lavish expenditure in the North, and the land which these two provinces possess will be swept into the general exchequer for the benefit of other parts of the Colony than those in which it is raised. Already, greedy eyes are cast upon the proceeds of our land sales, and to sit down quietly in fatuous apathy is merely to invice spoilation. Though we were neither a prophet nor a prophet's son, it needs no great skill to foretell this sign in the political horizon, and we are not alone in sounding the note of warning. Let the public see that they do their part. There is ample time to prepare petitions to the General Assembly before next session — ample time to take such ooncerted and vigorous action as could not fail of success. For years past there has been a growing feeling in favor of the simplifiication of our governing machinery ; and though we do not say that financial separation is a panacea for all our evils, the dividing of the Colony into two Provinces, with the control each of its own funds, the disposal of its own land revenue, the management or its own railways, and the conduct of its own immigration, it would at least do away with much of the unnecessary expenditure and obviate much of the mismanagement which are now so frequent and justly complained of."

A correspondent of a Sydney paper gives the following as a new cure for the toothache. It is this — Insert a piece of common washing sodo in the hollow-tooth, •end the aching will cease almost immediately. About a month since I was suffering gi-eatly for five days with this horrible complaint, and working some 70 or 100 miles away from a dentist, I tried washing soda ; the result was : For a quarter of an hour after I inserted the soda the tooth seemed to ache worse, but it gradually died away, and the nerve now seems to be quite dead. I can use the tooth on this side of my mouth now as well as ever, without fear of again producing pain, which I have not been able to do for the last two years. It is stated, we know not with what degree of truth, that a society is being organised and funds subscribed among the Sioux and Chippewas of Motana, Dakota and Arizona, in the United States, for the purpose of sending missionaries to New York to convert the inhabitants of that city to the principles of common humanity. It has come to the knowledge of these Indian tribes that 2000 children are annually tortured to death in that enlightened capital ; that most of these slow murders are perpetrated with the knowledge and connivance of the constituted authorities, and that the means it is explained by the " New York Tribune," from whence we derive the particulars, " comprise beating lacerating, poisoning by repeated small doses of opium, exposure to contagious diseases .and neglect in subsequent treatment, and slow starvation. The actual murderers are of the more ignorant and brutal class, as all executioners are." It appears that in the year 1 871 there were nearly 3000 illegitimate children born in the city of New York, and the official records show that at least 90 per cent, of those died of neglect, illtreatment, opium and disease. Whether the humane intention of the Indians will be carried into effect, and if so whether the Indian missionaries will ! make many converts, remains to be seen. We fear they will not ; for it is one of the triumphs of civilization that it beget an indifference to infant life, and it is one of the proudest achievements of modern science that it supplies a variety of subtle methods for the "taking off" of what society determines "the surplus population." In fact, some of the wealthiest physicians in New York and other large cities derive their magnificent incomes from practice of this kind among the opulent classes. But in any 'event, the movement is creditable to the Indians. „ The white men have expended large sums of money in efforts to evangelise the red man, and it will be" an act of delicate gratitude on the pare of the latter to endeavor to humanise, the pale faces,.