Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 September 1874 — Wan Lee as a Paper-Carrier. [ARTICLE]

Wan Lee as a Paper-Carrier.

His next performance, I grieve to say’, was not attended with equal success. One of our regular paper-carriers fell sick, and, at a pinch, Wan Lee was ordered to fill his place. To prevent mistakes he was shown over the route the previous evening, and supplied at about daylight with the usual number of subscribers’ copies. He returned after an hour in good spirits and without the papers. He had delivered them all, he said. Unfortunately for Wan Lee, at about eight o’clock indignant subscribers began to arrive at the office. They had received their copies; but how? In the form of hard-pressed cannon balls, delivered by a single shot and a mere tour de through the glass of bed-room windows. They had received them fpll in the face, like a base ball, if they happened to be up and stirring; they had received them in quarter sheets, tucked in at separate windows; they had found them in the chimney, pinned against the door, shot through attic windows, delivered in long slips through convenient keyholes, stuffed into ventilators, and occupying the same can with the morning’s milk. One subscriber, who waited for some time at the office door to have a personal interview’ with Wan Lee (then comfortably locked in my bed-room), told me, with tears of rage in his eyes, that he had been awakened at five o’clock by a most hideous yelling below his windows; that on rising, in great agitation, hewas startled by the sudden appearance of the Northern Star, rolled hard and bent in the form of a boomerang or East India club, that sailed into the window, described a number of fiendish circles in the room, knocked over the light, slapped the baby’s face, “ took" him (the subscriber) “in the jaw,” and then returned out of the window and dropped helplessly in the area. During the rest of the day wadsand strips of soiled paper, purporting to be copies of the Northern Star of that morning’s issue, were brought indignantly to the effice. An admirable editorial on “The Resources of Humboldt County” which I had constructed the evening before, and which, I had reason to believe, might have changed the whole balance of trade during the ensuing year, and left San Francisco bankrupt at her wharves, was in this way lost to the public.— Bret Harte, in Scribner's Monthly.