Chapter LV - Page 2

the office, where I had some specie laid
up. If anybody had told me that it would take me two years to pay back
that forty-six dollars to the banker (for I did not expect it of the
Prodigal, and was not disappointed), I would have felt injured. And so
would the banker.

I wanted a change. I wanted variety of some kind. It came. Mr. Goodman
went away for a week and left me the post of chief editor. It destroyed
me. The first day, I wrote my "leader" in the forenoon. The second day,
I had no subject and put it off till the afternoon. The third day I put
it off till evening, and then copied an elaborate editorial out of the
"American Cyclopedia," that steadfast friend of the editor, all over this
land. The fourth day I "fooled around" till midnight, and then fell back
on the Cyclopedia again. The fifth day I cudgeled my brain till
midnight, and then kept the press waiting while I penned some bitter
personalities on six different people. The sixth day I labored in
anguish till far into the night and brought forth--nothing. The paper
went to press without an editorial. The seventh day I resigned. On the
eighth, Mr. Goodman returned and found six duels on his hands--my
personalities had borne fruit.

Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor. It is
easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy
to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a
correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write
editorials. Subjects are the trouble--the dreary lack of them, I mean.
Every day, it is drag, drag, drag--think, and worry and suffer--all the
world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled.
Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done--it is no trouble to
write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains
dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year. It makes one low
spirited simply to think of it. The matter that each editor of a daily
paper in America writes in the course of a year would fill from four to
eight bulky volumes like this book! Fancy what a library an editor's
work would make, after twenty or thirty years' service. Yet people often
marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas, etc., have been able to
produce so many books. If these authors had wrought as voluminously as
newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed.
How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting
consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere
mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year
after year, is incomprehensible. Preachers take two months' holiday in
midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing,
in the