Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 September 1878 — The Exchange Fiend. [ARTICLE]

The Exchange Fiend.

The Exchange Fiend, after an absence of two weeks in the country, where he lived off his lame and widowed aunt, came into this office yesterday, and proceeded to take possession of our choicest exchanges, with his old-time familiarity. “I’ve been ouff in the country,” he said, “for, it seens to me, at least six mouths, and I haven’t seen a paper, excepting the Christian Monitor or the Saints' Rest, Since I’ve been away. I want to read/up this awful yellow-fever scourge which ip depopulating the Southern cities. It’s the most terrible thing I ever heard of, and I can hardly wait until I get hold of a New York paper to read about it. ” “Here’s the New Orleans Times," replied the exchange editor, drawing a copy of that paper from the pile before him; “it hasn’t had anything in it for three weeks but Yellow Fever, Yellow Jack, Saffron Scourge, Bronze John, the Carnival of Death”—

“Merciful heaven!” exclaimed the Fiend, throwing uo his hands in horror, and retreating to the center of the room. “Why, that paper is printed right in the heart of the infected district, and there is nothing in the wide world that will carry disease through the country like a newspaper. I wouldn’t touch it for half of Oil City. ” “Beg pardoi,” said the editor, tossing the paper in the direction of the Fiend, from which that individual leaped as from a snake about to strike; “ beg pardon; here is yesterday’s Memphis Avalanche, damp from the press, with the smell of the bayous still upon it; sixty deaths occurred there the day before its publication, and it will give you elaborate details”— “Take it away, take it away !” yelled the Fiend, retreating to the door, breathing hard, and looking like a man with the horrors; “please throw me over a New York or Boston paper, and I’ll read it at home.” “ For real information,” continued the editor, unmoved, “I would recommend this Itttle paper; it's editor and pressman died of the disease day before yesterday, and two reporters and seven printers are now down with it,” and the young man twisted the paper into a ball and hit the Fiend iu the face with it, remarking, “It’s the Grenada Sun, and hasn’t a blessed thing in it but yellow fever and ads.” Before the editor had finished the Exchange Fiend uttered a shriek like a lost soul, turned a back handspring out of the door, and disappeared down the stairway, seven steps at a jump.— Oil City Derrick.