Just at present Mr. Sewell was taking two morning papers: the
_Advertiser_ which he had always taken, and a cheap little one-
cent paper, which had just been started, and which he bad subscribed
for experimentally, with the vague impression that he ought to
encourage the young men who had established it. He did not like it
very well. It was made up somewhat upon the Western ideal, and dealt
with local matters in a manner that was at once a little more lively
and a little more intimate than he had been used to. But before he
had quite made up his mind to stop it, his wife had come to like it
on that very account. She said it was interesting. On this point she
used her conscience a little less actively than usual, and he had to
make her observe that to be interesting was not the whole duty of
journalism. It had become a matter of personal pride with them
respectively to attack and defend _The Sunrise_, as I shall
call the little sheet, though that was not the name; and Mr. Sewell
had lately made some gain through the character of the police
reports, which _The Sunrise_ had been developing into a feature. It
was not that offensive matters were introduced; the worst cases
were in fact rather blinked, but Sewell insisted that the tone of
flippant gaiety with which many facts, so serious, so tragic for
their perpetrators and victims, were treated was odious. He objected
to the court being called a Mill, and prisoners Grists, and the
procedure Grinding; he objected to the familiar name of Uncle for
the worthy gentleman to whose care certain offenders were confided
on probation. He now read that department of _The Sunrise_ the first
thing every morning, in the hope of finding something with which to put
Mrs. Sewell hopelessly in the wrong, but this morning a heading in
the foreign news of the _Advertiser_ caught his eye, and he laid
_The Sunrise_ aside to read at the breakfast-table. His wife came
down in a cotton dress, as a tribute to the continued warmth of the