Every man on the town list helped edit the thing--that is,
he gave orders as to how it was to be edited; dictated its opinions,
marked out its course for it, and every time the boss failed to connect
he stopped his paper. We were just infested with critics, and we tried
to satisfy them all over. We had one subscriber who paid cash, and he
was more trouble than all the rest. He bought us once a year, body and
soul, for two dollars. He used to modify our politics every which way,
and he made us change our religion four times in five years. If we ever
tried to reason with him, he would threaten to stop his paper, and, of
course, that meant bankruptcy and destruction. That man used to write
articles a column and a half long, leaded long primer, and sign them
"Junius," or "Veritas," or "Vox Populi," or some other high-sounding rot;
and then, after it was set up, he would come in and say he had changed
his mind-which was a gilded figure of speech, because he hadn't any--and
order it to be left out. We couldn't afford "bogus" in that office, so
we always took the leads out, altered the signature, credited the article
to the rival paper in the next village, and put it in.
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