Campaigns of a Non-Combatant | Page 3

special favor, I might write
all the leaders the next night. Mr. Watch was seen no more in the
sanctum for a week, and my three dollars carried on the concern.
When he returned, he generously gave me a dollar, and said that he had
spoken of me to the Water-Gas Company as a capital secretary. Then
he wrote me a pass for the Arch Street Theatre, and told me,
benevolently, to go off and rest that night.
For a month or more the responsibility of the Chameleon devolved
almost entirely upon me. Child that I was, knowing no world but my
own vanity, and pleased with those who fed its sensitive love of
approbation rather than with the just and reticent, I harbored no distrust
till one day when Axiom visited the office, and I was drawing my three
dollars from the treasurer, I heard Mr. Watch exclaim, within the
publisher's room--
"Did you read my article on the Homestead Bill?"
"Yes," answered Axiom; "it was quite clever; your leaders are more
alive and epigrammatic than they were."
I could stand it no more. I bolted into the office, and cried--
"The article on the Homestead Bill is mine, so is every other article in
to-day's paper. Mr. Watch does not tell the truth; he is ungenerous!"

"What's this, Watch?" said Axiom.
"Alfred," exclaimed Mr. Watch, majestically, "adopts my suggestions
very readily, and is quite industrious. I recommend that we raise his
salary to five dollars a week. That is a large sum for a lad."
That night the manuscript was overhauled in the composing room.
Watch's dereliction was manifest; but not a word was said
commendatory of my labor; it was feared I might take "airs," or covet a
further increase of wages. I only missed Watch's hugh pearl, and heard
that he had been discharged, and was myself taken from the drudgery
of the scissors, and made a reporter.
All this was very recent, yet to me so far remote, that as I recall it all, I
wonder if I am not old, and feel nervously of my hairs. For in the five
intervening years I have ridden at Hoe speed down the groove of my
steel-pen.
The pen is my traction engine; it has gone through worlds of fancy and
reflection, dragging me behind it; and long experience has given it so
great facility, that I have only to fire up, whistle, and fix my couplings,
and away goes my locomotive with no end of cars in train.
Few journalists, beginning at the bottom, do not weary of the ladder ere
they climb high. Few of such, or of others more enthusiastic, recall the
early associations of "the office" with pleasure. Yet there is no world
more grotesque, none, at least in America, more capable of fictitious
illustration. Around a newspaper all the dramatis personæ of the world
congregate; within it there are staid idiosyncratic folk who admit of all
kindly caricature.
I summon from that humming and hurly-burly past, the ancient
proof-reader. He wears a green shade over his eyes and the gas burner
is drawn very low to darken the bald and wrinkled contour of his
forehead. He is severe in judgment and spells rigidly by the Johnsonian
standard. He punctuates by an obdurate and conscientious method, and
will have no italics upon any pretext. He will lend you money, will eat
with you, drink with you, and encourage you; but he will not punctuate

with you, spell with you, nor accept any of your suggestions as to
typography or paragraphing whatsoever. He wears slippers and smokes
a primitive clay pipe; he has everything in its place, and you cannot
offend him more than by looking over any proof except when he is
holding it. A chip of himself is the copyholder at his side,--a meagre,
freckled, matter of fact youth, who reads your tenderest sentences in a
rapid monotone, and is never known to venture any opinion or
suggestion whatever. This boy, I am bound to say, will follow the copy
if it be all consonants, and will accompany it if it flies out of the
window.
The office clerk was my bane and admiration. He was presumed by the
verdant patrons of the paper to be its owner and principal editor, its
type-setter, pressman, and carrier. His hair was elaborately curled, and
his ears were perfect racks of long and dandyfied pens; a broad,
shovel-shaped gold pen lay forever opposite his high stool; he had an
arrogant and patronizing address, and was the perpetual cabbager of
editorial perquisites. Books, ball-tickets, season-tickets, pictures,
disappeared in his indiscriminate fist, and he promised notices which
he could not write to no end of applicants. He was to be seen at the
theatre every night, and he was