Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 July 1886 — The Country Editor. [ARTICLE]

The Country Editor.

The lot of the country editor is not a happy one. He has to submit to many forms of oppression and injustice that his metropolitan brother is unacquainted with. A village grocer will enter the publication office with a patronizing air, as though he owned the village and held a mortgage on two or three more, and orders the insertion of a two-inch advertisement, worth about a dollar, which he pays—next year, if he is dunned often enough. The man of commerce will then casually mention that a half-column special notice upon the editorial page, calling attention to the merits of his stock of dried codfish and Bermuda onions, would be acceptFor this he pays the enormous sum of $030,000.00.

For a half-column portrait of a dude attired in an eight-dollar suit and a St. Patrick’s Day plug hat, the fashionable tailor gives him a box of paper collars, and if he has been profuse with his special notices he will also get a buffalo horn collar-button or a calico necktie out of last year’s stock. He usually secures admission to all entertainments, public and private, upon complimentary tickets, the donors well knowing that for every ounce of outlay, in the shape of a fifteen cent ticket they will secure a pound of profit in the shape of half column puffs.

He goes to the strawberry festival, and for a bite of sponge cake, a mouthful of strawberries and a glass of feeble lemonade he is expected to announce in his next issue, in glaring head-lines, “A Notable Event!—A Congregation of Talent, Wit, Wealth and Beauty!” As a rule, this class are his severest critics, and seldom subscribe for his paper if they can borrow it of their poorer neighbors who pay for it. He goes to the circus, gazes upon the sacred steer and stuffed monkey, exchanges smiles with the hyena, watches the gyrations of the trick mule, listens to the copyrighted jokes of the clown, and has his pockets picked of the $4 oreide watch won at a raffle for the benefit of the parson.

In the lecture room he is a wearied listener to the shabby, long-haired professor who lectures upon “The Cucumber, and the relation it bears to the Colic,” or a long and elaborate essay upon the “Extermination of Bed Bugs. ” He is pestered by a large class of writers whose contributions smack of nothing but the writer’s lack of brains. This class is usually composed of those men who, when told that their sketches are declined, coolly adjust their singlebarreled eye-glasses and exclaim, “But, bigod, sir, I have been to college, you know!” Tlie poor fools do not know that the best of all schools in which to acquire a thorough journalistic education is the printing office. Most of the great editors of the day can go to the case and “rattle up” a stickful as quickly and well as any of the boys.

Amateur printers borrow and never return his type, and a thousand other things occur to make life as burdensome to him as that of the man who pays SI,OOO alimony per year to his red-haired, pug-nosed and frecklefaced sometime wife. He dines not upon ox-tail soup and champainge, but is content with pigs’ rump and cabbage which he washes down with Budweiser beer occasionally. The editor’s day of triumph is when he writes the obituary of one of his tormentors, and he celebrates it in a befitting manner. Immediately after placing the copy in the hands of a compositor he goes out. Soon afterward he is seen on the street, his heels occasionally kissing the back of his neck as he tries to forge ahead. When he reaches the office the men have gone to dinner. He sits down and broods over his troubles and wishes that he were dead. Ah, well! The lead butchers return to work; they see a figure lying upon the floor. The lift it and tenderly place it in the lye trough;' he is cold and dead —drunk. Yes, an obituary means something to a country editor. He lives like a ringtailed moke and lies like a spotted jehosophat, dear, indulgent, liverlipped reader. —Ca amity Sam, in Through Mail.