St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1886-02-04
MARK TWAIN AS A ..DEvIL,,
On a Newspaper of SIS Years Ago.
From S. L. Clemens's Speech Before the
York -TvD0thoafaa

Iali iHeO "reminiscences, TOT mySoiI am
something of an antiquity. All things
change in the procession of years, and
it may be that | am among strangers.
1t may be that the printer of to-day is
not the printer of 35 years ago. was
no stranger to him. | knew him well.
L built his fire for him in the winter
mornings brought his water from
the village pump; swept out his Of
fee picked up his type from under
his stand /; and, if he was there to see,
put the good type in his case and the
broken ones among the ''hell matter )"
and if he wasn't there to see, dumped
it all with the Cpl" on the imposing
stone-for that was the furtive fashion
of the cub, and l was the cub. | wetted
down the paper Saturdays, | turned it
Sundays-fOr this was a country week
ly l rolled, | washed the rollers,
washed the forms, l folded the papers,
carried them around at dawn Thurs
day mornings, | enveloped the papers
for the native had 100 town sub
scribers and $50 country ones; the
town subscribers paid in groceries, and
the country ones in cabbages and cord
woOd-when they paid at all, which
was merely sometimes, and then we
always stated the fact in the paper,
and gave them puff; and if we for
got it they stopped the paper.
Every man on the town list helped
edit the thing that is, he gave orders
as to how it was to be edited dict ated
it's opinions, marked out its course for
it, and every time the boss failed to
connect, he stopped his paper. We
were just infested with critics, and we
tried to satisfy them all over. We had
one subscriber who paid cash, and he
was more trouble to us than all the
rest. He bought us, once a year, body
and soul, for S.. He used to modify
our politics every which way, and he
made us change our religion four times
In five years. If we ever tried to rea
son with him, he would threaten to
stop his paper, and, of course, that
meant bankruptcy and destruction.
That man used to write articles col
umn and half long, loaded long prim
er, and sign them "Junius" or "Veri
tas" or "VOx Populi," or some other
high sounding rot; and then, after it
was set up, he would come in and say
he had changed his mind-which was
gilded figure of speech, because he
hadn't any-and order it to be left out
We couldn't stand such waste as
that; we couldn't afford "bogus" in
that Office so we always took the
leads out, altered the signature, cred
tied the article to the rival paper in
the next village, and put it in.
Well, we did have one OF two kinds
of "bOgus." Whenever there was a
barbecue, or a circus, or a baptizing,
we knocked off for half day; and
then to make up for short matter we
would ''turn over ads"-turn over the
whole page and duplicate it. The 9TH
er bogus was deep philosophical stuff,
which we judged nobody ever read so
we kept galley of it standing and
kept on slapping the same old patches
of it in every now and then, till it got
dangerous. Also, in the early days of
the telegraph we used to economic on
the news. We picked out the items
that were pOintless and barren of in
formation and stand them on galley
and changed the dates and localities
and used them over and over again till
the public interest in them was worn
to the bone. We marked the ads, but
we seldom paid any attention to the
marks afterward so the life of "td"
ad and "tf" adj was equally eternal.
| have seen "td" notice of sheriff's
sale still booming serenely along two
years after the sale was over, the sheriff
dead, and the whole circumstances be-
come ancient history. Most of the
yearly ads were patent medicine stere-
Otypes and we used to fence with them.
Life was easy with us if we pied a
form we suspended till next week, and
we always suspended every now and
then when the fishing was good, and
explained it by the illness of the edi
tor, a paltry excuse, because that kind
of a paper was just as well off with a
sick editor as well one, and better
off with dead one than with either of
them. He was full of blessed egotism
and placid self-importance, but he
didn't know as much as a three -em
quad. He never set any type except
in the rush OF the last day, and then
he would smOuch all the poetry, and
leave the rest to "jeff" for the solid
takes. He wrote with impressive fiat
ulence and soaring confidence upon
the vastest subjects; but putting aims,
gifts of wedding cake, salty ice-cream,
abnormal watermelons, and sweet pO-
hold. He was always a poet-a kind
of poet of the Carriers address breed
and whenever his intellect suppur-
ated, and he read the result to the
printers and asked for their opinion,
they were very frank and straightfor-
ward about it. They generally scrap
ed their rules on the boxes all the time
he was reading, and called it "hOg-
wash" when he got through.
All this was 35 years ago, when the
man who could set 700 an hour could
put on just as many airs as he wanted
to and if these New York men, who
recently on wager set 1000 an hour
solid miniOn for four hours on a stretch
had appeared in that Office, they would
have been received as accOmplishers of
the supremacy impossible, and drench-
ed with hOspitable beer till the brew
cry was bankrupt. | can see that
printing Office of prehistoric times yet,
with it's horse bills on the walls, its
I'd" boxes clogged with tallow, because
we always stood the candle in the "k"
box nights, it's towel, which was not
soiled until it could stand
alone, and other signs and symbols
that marked the establishment of that
kind in the Mississippi valley and
can see also the tramping 'jour." who
fitted by ia the summer and tarried a
day, with his wallet stuffed with one
shirt and a hatful of hand-bills for if
he couldn't get any type to set he
would do temperance lecture. His
way of life was simple, his needs not
all he wanted was plate and
bed and money enough to get drunk
IN, and he was satisfied. But it may
pc as | have said, that 1 am among
strangers, and sing the glories of a