Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 March 1878 — Cook’s Lectures. [ARTICLE]

Cook’s Lectures.

In former' days when a man entered a Bpston newspaper office and manifested a disposition to wait until the editor came in, it was customary to give him a volume of Emerson wherewith to amuse himself, but Joseph Cook’s-Monday lectures have been substituted, and the effect is excellent. The visitor comes in, happy and smiling; he-knows all about the._Bogardus kicker, and Max Adsler’s chair that shuts a man up like a jack-knife, and Burdette’s movable floor that slides a man out of the editorial room, and he is not to be imposed upon by any of these things. He picks up a chair, sets it down near that of an assistant scribbler, cutter and paster, and shouts, “Editor isn’t in, is he?” “No,” says the victim, smiling with the sweetness thit comes of long practice. “He won’t be in for three hours. Wpuldn’t you like something to read until he comes?” and, handing out tire Advertiser, the assistant goes to work again. The visitor begins on the Monday lecture immediately, beguiled by the biggest letters that the Advertiser's conscience allows it to use. At the end of five minutes he gasps, “ Great man, this Cook!” In -ten, he .whispers, “Immense man!” In fifteen he looks up. and inquires, ,“ Say, do you talk like this all the time in Boston?” “We can.” says the assistant, briefly. “Well, well,” murmurs the visitor, and glides away, forgetting his errand, and lost to use and name and fame in what Mr. Cook would call the tortuous enswathment and engirdling environment of the efflorescent possibilities of polysyllables.— Danbury News. ■ In the event oi war between England and Russia our own country will show sympathy with neither, but stand aside and sell things for cash to both,