IV.

On the first page was a poem, which I suppose I must have selected,

and then a story, filling all the rest of the page, which my brother

more probably chose; for he had a decided fancy in fiction, and

had a scrap-book of inexhaustible riches, which he could draw upon

indefinitely for old personal or family favorites. The next page was

filled with selections of various kinds, and with original matter

interesting to farmers. Then came a page of advertisements, and then

the editorial page, where my father had given his opinions of the

political questions which interested him, and which he thought it the

duty of the country press to discuss, with sometimes essays in the

field of religion and morals. There was a letter of two columns from

Washington, contributed every week by the congressman who represented

our district; and there was a letter from New York, written by a young

lady of the county who was studying art under a master of portraiture

then flourishing in the metropolis; if that is not stating it too

largely for the renown of Thomas Hicks, as we see it in a vanishing

perspective. The rest of this page, as well as the greater part of the

next, was filled with general news, clipped from the daily papers, and

partly condensed from them. There was also such local intelligence

as offered itself, and communications on the affairs of village and

county; but the editor did not welcome tidings of new barns and

abnormal vegetation, or flatter hens to lay eggs of unusual size or

with unusual frequency by undue public notice. All that order of minute

neighborhood gossip which now makes the country paper a sort of open

letter was then unknown. He published marriages and deaths, and such

obituary notices as the sorrowing fondness of friends prompted them to

send him; and he introduced the custom of publishing births, after the

English fashion, which the people took to kindly.

We had an ambition, even so remotely as that day, in the direction of

the illustration which has since so flourished in the newspapers. Till

then we had never gone further in the art than to print a jubilant

raccoon over the news of some Whig victory, or, what was to the same

purpose, an inverted cockerel in mockery of the beaten Democrats; but

now we rose to the notion of illustrated journalism. We published a

story with a woodcut in it, and we watched to see how that cut came out

all through the edition with a pride that was perhaps too exhaustive;

at any rate, we never tried another.

Of course, much of the political writing in the paper was

controversial, and was carried on with editors of other opinions

elsewhere in the county, for we had no rival in our own village. In

this, which has always been the vice of American journalism, the

country press was then fully as provincial as the great metropolitan

journals are now. These may be more pitilessly personal in the conduct

of their political discussions, and a little more skilled in obloquy

and insult; but the bickering went on in the country papers quite as

idly and foolishly. I fancy nobody really cared for our quarrels, and

that those who followed them were disgusted when they were more than

merely wearied.

The space given to them might better have been given even to original

poetry. This was sometimes accepted, but was not invited; though

our sixth page commonly began with verse of some kind. Then came

more prose selections, but never at any time accounts of murder or

violent crimes, which the editor abominated in themselves and believed

thoroughly corrupting. Advertisements of various kinds filled out the

sheet, which was simple and quiet in typography, wholly without the

hand-bill display which now renders nearly all newspapers repulsive

to the eye. I am rather proud, in my quality of printer, that this

was the style which I established; and we maintained it against all

advertisers, who then as now wished to out-shriek one another in large

type and ugly woodcuts.

It was by no means easy to hold a firm hand with the “live business

men” of our village and country, who came out twice a year with

the spring and fall announcements of their fresh stocks of goods,

which they had personally visited New York to lay in; but one of the

moral advantages of an enterprise so modest as ours was that the

counting-room and the editorial-room were united under the same head,

and this head was the editor’s. After all, I think we lost nothing

by the bold stand we made in behalf of good taste, and at any rate

we risked it when we had not the courage to cut off our delinquent

subscribers.

We had business advertising from all the villages in the county,

for the paper had a large circle of readers in each, and a certain

authority, in virtue of representing the county-seat. But a great deal

of our advertising was of patent medicines, as the advertising still

is in the country papers. It was very profitable, and so was the legal

advertising, when we could get the money for it. The money had to come

by order of court, and about half the time the order of court failed

to include the costs of advertising. Then we did not get it, and we

never got it, though we were always glad to get the legal advertising

on the chance of getting the pay. It was not official, but was made

up of the lawyers’ notices to defendants of the suits brought against

them. If it had all been paid for, I am not sure that we should now be

in a position to complain of the ingratitude of the working-classes, or

prepared to discuss, from a vantage of personal experience, the duty

of vast wealth to the community; but still we should have been better

off for that money, as well as the money we lost by a large and loyal

list of delinquent subscribers. From time to time there were stirring

appeals to these adherents in the editorial columns, which did not

stir them, and again the most flattering offers to take any kind of

produce in payment of subscription. Sometimes my brother boldly tracked

the delinquents to their lairs. In most cases I fancy they escaped

whatever arts he used to take them; many died peacefully in their beds

afterward, and their debts follow them to this day. Still, he must now

and then have got money from them, and I am sure he did get different

kinds of “trade.” Once, I remember, he brought back in the tail of his

wagon a young pig, a pig so very young that my father pronounced it

“merely an organization.” Whether it had been wrought to frenzy or not

by the strange experiences of its journey, I cannot say, but as soon

as it was set down on the ground it began to run madly, and it kept on

running till it fell down and perished miserably. It had been taken for

a year’s subscription, and it was quite as if we had lost a delinquent

subscriber.