Chapter 1

MY IMPRESSMENT.

"Here is a piece of James Franklin's printing press, Mr. Townsend," said Mr. Pratt to me, at Newport the other day,--"Ben. Franklin wrote for the paper, and set type upon it. The press was imported from England in 1730, or thereabouts."

He produced a piece of wood, a foot in length, and then laid it away in its drawer very sacredly.

"I should like to write to that press, Mr. Pratt," I said,--"there would be no necessity in such a case of getting off six columns for to-night's mail."

"Well!" said Mr. Pratt, philosophically, "I have a theory that a man grows up to machinery. As your day so shall your strength be. I believe you have telegraphed up to a House instrument, haven't you?"

"Mr. Pratt," cried I, with some indignation, "your memory is too good. This is Newport, and I have come down to see the surf. Pray, do not remind me of hot hours in a newspaper office, the click of a Morse dispatch, and work far into the midnight!"

So I left Mr. Pratt, of the Newport _Mercury_, with an ostentation of affront, and bade James Brady, the boatman, hoist sail and carry me over to Dumpling Rocks.

On the grassy parapet of the crumbling tower which once served the purposes of a fort, the transparent water hungering at its base, the rocks covered with fringe spotting the channel, the ocean on my right hand lost in its own vastness, and Newport out of mind save when the town bells rang, or the dip of oars beat in the still swell of Narragansett,--I lay down, chafing and out of temper, to curse the only pleasurable labor I had ever undertaken.

To me all places were workshops: the seaside, the springs, the summer mountains, the cataracts, the theatres, the panoramas of islet-fondled rivers speeding by strange cities. I was condemned to look upon them all with mercenary eyes, to turn their gladness into torpid prose, and speak their praises in turgid columns. Never nepenthe, never _abandonne_, always wide-awake, and watching for saliences, I had gone abroad like a falcon, and roamed at home like a hungry jackal. Six fingers on my hand, one long and pointed, and ever dropping gall; the ineradicable stain upon my thumb; the widest of my circuits, with all my adventure, a paltry sheet of foolscap; and the world in which I dwelt, no place for thought, or dreaminess, or love-making,--only the fierce, fast, flippant existence of news!

And with this inward execration, I lay on Dumpling Rocks, looking to sea, and recalled the first fond hours of my newspaper life.

To be a subject of old Hoe, the most voracious of men, I gave up the choice of three sage professions, and the sweet alternative of idling husbandry.

The day I graduated saw me an _attaché_ of the Philadelphia _Chameleon_. I was to receive three dollars a week and be the heir to lordly prospects. In the long course of persevering years I might sit in the cushions of the night-editor, or speak of the striplings around me as "_my_ reporters."

"There is nothing which you cannot attain," said Mr. Axiom, my employer,--"think of the influence you exercise!--more than a clergyman; Horace Greeley was an editor; so was George D. Prentice; the first has just been defeated for Congress; the last lectured last night and got fifty dollars for it."

Hereat I was greatly encouraged, and proposed to write a leader for next day's paper upon the evils of the Fire Department.

"Dear me," said Mr. Axiom, "you would ruin our circulation at a wink; what would become of our ball column? in case of a fire in the building we couldn't get a hose to play on it. Oh! no, Alfred, writing leaders is hard and dangerous; I want you first to learn the use of a beautiful pair of scissors."

I looked blank and chopfallen.

"No man can write a good hand or a good style," he said, "without experience with scissors. They give your palm flexibility and that is soon imparted to the mind. But perfection is attained by an alternate use of the scissors and the pen; if a little paste be prescribed at the same time, cohesion and steadfastness is imparted to the man."

His reasoning was incontrovertible; but I damned his conclusions.

So, I spent one month in slashing several hundred exchanges a day, and paragraphing all the items. These reappeared in a column called "THE LATEST INFORMATION," and when I found them copied into another journal, a flush of satisfaction rose to my face.

The editor of the _Chameleon_ was an old journalist, whose face was a sealed book of Confucius, and who talked to me, patronizingly, now and then, like the Delphic Oracle. His name was Watch, and he wore a prodigious pearl in his shirt-bosom. He crept up to the editorial room at nine o'clock every night, and dashed off an hour's worth of glittering generalities, at the end of which time two or three gentlemen, blooming at the nose, and with cheeks resembling a map drawn in red ink, sounded the pipe below stairs, and Mr. Watch said--

"Mr. Townsend, I look to you to be on hand to-night; I am called away by the Water-Gas Company."

Then, with enthusiasm up to blood-heat, aroused by this mark of confidence, I used to set to, and scissor and write till three o'clock, while Mr. Watch talked water-gas over brandy and water, and drew his thirty dollars punctually on Saturdays.

So it happened that my news paragraphs, sometimes pointedly turned into a reflection, crept into the editorial columns, when water-gas was lively. Venturing more and more, the clipper finally indited a leader; and Mr. Watch, whose nose water-gas was reddening, applauded me, and told me in his sublime way, that, as a special favor, I might write all the leaders the next night. Mr. Watch was seen no more in the sanctum for a week, and my three dollars carried on the concern.

When he returned, he generously gave me a dollar, and said that he had spoken of me to the Water-Gas Company as a capital secretary. Then he wrote me a pass for the Arch Street Theatre, and told me, benevolently, to go off and rest that night.

For a month or more the responsibility of the _Chameleon_ devolved almost entirely upon me. Child that I was, knowing no world but my own vanity, and pleased with those who fed its sensitive love of approbation rather than with the just and reticent, I harbored no distrust till one day when Axiom visited the office, and I was drawing my three dollars from the treasurer, I heard Mr. Watch exclaim, within the publisher's room--

"Did you read my article on the Homestead Bill?"

"Yes," answered Axiom; "it was quite clever; your leaders are more alive and epigrammatic than they were."

I could stand it no more. I bolted into the office, and cried--

"The article on the Homestead Bill is mine, so is every other article in to-day's paper. Mr. Watch does not tell the truth; he is ungenerous!"

"What's this, Watch?" said Axiom.

"Alfred," exclaimed Mr. Watch, majestically, "adopts my suggestions very readily, and is quite industrious. I recommend that we raise his salary to five dollars a week. That is a large sum for a lad."

That night the manuscript was overhauled in the composing room. Watch's dereliction was manifest; but not a word was said commendatory of my labor; it was feared I might take "airs," or covet a further increase of wages. I only missed Watch's hugh pearl, and heard that he had been discharged, and was myself taken from the drudgery of the scissors, and made a reporter.

All this was very recent, yet to me so far remote, that as I recall it all, I wonder if I am not old, and feel nervously of my hairs. For in the five intervening years I have ridden at Hoe speed down the groove of my steel-pen.

The pen is my traction engine; it has gone through worlds of fancy and reflection, dragging me behind it; and long experience has given it so great facility, that I have only to fire up, whistle, and fix my couplings, and away goes my locomotive with no end of cars in train.

Few journalists, beginning at the bottom, do not weary of the ladder ere they climb high. Few of such, or of others more enthusiastic, recall the early associations of "the office" with pleasure. Yet there is no world more grotesque, none, at least in America, more capable of fictitious illustration. Around a newspaper all the dramatis personæ of the world congregate; within it there are staid idiosyncratic folk who admit of all kindly caricature.

I summon from that humming and hurly-burly past, the ancient proof-reader. He wears a green shade over his eyes and the gas burner is drawn very low to darken the bald and wrinkled contour of his forehead. He is severe in judgment and spells rigidly by the Johnsonian standard. He punctuates by an obdurate and conscientious method, and will have no italics upon any pretext. He will lend you money, will eat with you, drink with you, and encourage you; but he will not punctuate with you, spell with you, nor accept any of your suggestions as to typography or paragraphing whatsoever. He wears slippers and smokes a primitive clay pipe; he has everything in its place, and you cannot offend him more than by looking over any proof except when he is holding it. A chip of himself is the copyholder at his side,--a meagre, freckled, matter of fact youth, who reads your tenderest sentences in a rapid monotone, and is never known to venture any opinion or suggestion whatever. This boy, I am bound to say, will follow the copy if it be all consonants, and will accompany it if it flies out of the window.

The office clerk was my bane and admiration. He was presumed by the verdant patrons of the paper to be its owner and principal editor, its type-setter, pressman, and carrier. His hair was elaborately curled, and his ears were perfect racks of long and dandyfied pens; a broad, shovel-shaped gold pen lay forever opposite his high stool; he had an arrogant and patronizing address, and was the perpetual cabbager of editorial perquisites. Books, ball-tickets, season-tickets, pictures, disappeared in his indiscriminate fist, and he promised notices which he could not write to no end of applicants. He was to be seen at the theatre every night, and he was the dashing escort of the proprietor's wife, who preferred his jaunty coat and highly-polished boots to the less elaborate wardrobe of us writers. That this noble and fashionable creature could descend to writing wrappers, and to waiting his turn with a bank-book in the long train of a sordid teller, passed all speculation and astonishment. He made a sorry fag of the office boy, and advised us every day to beware of cutting the files, as if that were the one vice of authors. To him we stole, with humiliated faces, and begged a trifling advance of salary. He sternly requested us not to encroach behind the counter--his own indisputable domain--but sometimes asked us to watch the office while he drank with a theatrical agent at the nearest bar. He was an inveterate gossip, and endowed with a damnable love of slipshod argument; the only oral censor upon our compositions, he hailed us with all the complaints made at his solicitation by irascible subscribers, and stood in awe of the cashier only, who frequently, to our delight and surprise, combed him over, and drove him to us for sympathy.

The foreman was still our power behind the throne; he left out our copy on mechanical grounds, and put it in for our modesty and sophistry. In his broad, hot room, all flaring with gas, he stood at a flat stone like a surgeon, and took forms to pieces and dissected huge columns of pregnant metal, and paid off the hands with fabulous amounts of uncurrent bank bills. His wife and he went thrice a year on excursions to the sea-side, and he was forever borrowing a dollar from somebody to treat the lender and himself.

The ship-news man could be seen towards the small-hours, writing his highly imaginative department, which showed how the Sally Ann, Master Todd, arrived leaky in Bombay harbor; and there were stacks of newsboys asleep on the boilers, fighting in their dreams for the possession of a fragment of a many-cornered blanket.

These, like myself, went into the halcyon land of Nod to the music of a crashing press, and swarmed about it at the dawn like so many gad flies about an ox, to carry into the awakening city the rhetoric and the rubbish I had written.

And still they go, and still the great press toils along, and still am I its slave and keeper, who sit here by the proud, free sea, and feel like Sinbad, that to a terrible old man I have sold my youth, my convictions, my love, my life!