somewhere about him."

"Tut! tut!" cried Dr. Butterfield. "I think, Mr. Givemfits, you are
entirely mistaken. (The doctor all the while stirring the sugar in his
cup.) I think the printing-press is a mighty agency for the world's
betterment. If I were not a minister, I would be an editor. There are
Bohemians in the newspaper profession, as in all others, but do not
denounce the entire apostleship for the sake of one Judas. Reporters, as I
know them, are clever fellows, worked almost to death, compelled to keep
unseasonable hours, and have temptations to fight which few other
occupations endure. Considering the blunders and indistinctness of the
public speaker, I think they get things wonderfully accurate. The speaker
murders the king's English, and is mad because the reporter cannot
resuscitate the corpse. I once made a speech at an ice-cream festival amid
great embarrassments, and hemmed, and hawed, and expectorated cotton from
my dry mouth, and sweat like a Turkish bath, the adjectives, and the nouns,
and verbs, and prepositions of my address keeping an Irish wake; but the
next day, in the 'Johnstown Advocate,' my remarks read as gracefully as
Addison's 'Spectator.' I knew a phonographer in Washington whose entire
business it was to weed out from Congressmen's speeches the sins against
Anglo-Saxon; but the work was too much for him, and he died of delirium
tremens, from having drank too much of the wine of syntax, in his ravings
imagining that 'interrogations' were crawling over him like snakes, and
that 'interjections' were thrusting him through with daggers and 'periods'
struck him like bullets, and his body seemed torn apart by disjunctive
conjunctions. No, Mr. Givemfits, you are too hard. And as to the
book-critics whom you condemn, they do more for the circulation of books
than any other class, especially if they denounce and caricature, for then
human nature will see the book at any price. After I had published my book
on 'The Philosophy of Civilization,' it was so badgered by the critics and