PS 
 
 2029 
 
 C6 
 
 1896 
 
 MAIN 
 
A Howells Sonnet ! | 
 
 L. H. LIKL,MAN. Ualtimore. Md. i 
 Tht Howe! Is poem desired by " r \f I 
 W in your issue of Nov. 14 is as 
 follows : 
 
 THE BEWILf EKEI> GUEST 
 ! was not asked if 1 should l ke to 
 
 come. 
 
 I have not seen my host -fcmce I came, ; . 
 Or had a word of "tveloome in his ; - 
 
 name. 
 Some say that we shall never see him 
 
 and some . 
 That we < .^itl see him elsewhere, and ! 
 
 the-. t know 
 V". ny we were bid. How long I am i 
 
 to stay 
 I have not the least notion. None, 
 
 they say, 
 Was- ever told when he should come 
 
 or go. 
 Hut every now and then there bursts I 
 
 upon 
 The song and mirth a lamentable 
 
 noise, 
 A .sound of shrieks and sobs that 
 
 strikes our joys 
 IHimb in our breasts: and then some! 
 
 one is gone. 
 They say we meet him. None knows ; 
 
 where or when. 
 
 We know we shall not meet him here ! 
 again. . j 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
Reprinted for private distribution only 
 by The Plimpton Press for its friends 
 through the courteous permission of 
 Harper $ Brothers and the Author 
 
 LIMITED TO FOUR HUNDRED COPIES 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 AN ESSAY BY 
 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 
 
 PRIVATELY PRINTED 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 MY earliest memories, or those which I 
 can make sure are not the sort of early 
 hearsay that we mistake for remem 
 brance later in life, concern a country newspaper, 
 or, rather, a country printing-office. The office 
 was in my childish consciousness some years before 
 the paper was; the compositors rhythmically 
 swaying before their cases of type; the pressman 
 flinging himself back on the bar that made the 
 impression, with a swirl of his long hair; the ap 
 prentice rolling the forms, and the foreman bend 
 ing over the imposing-stone were familiar to me 
 when I could not grasp the notion of any effect 
 from their labors. In due time I came to know 
 all about it, and to understand that these activi 
 ties went to the making of the Whig newspaper 
 which my father edited to the confusion of the 
 Locofocos, and in the especial interest of Henry 
 Clay ; I myself supported this leader so vigorously 
 for the presidency in my seventh year that it was 
 long before I could realize that the election of 
 1 844 had resulted in his defeat. My father had 
 
4 THF COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 already been a printer for a good many years, and 
 sometime >n the early thirties he had led a literary 
 forlorn-hope, in a West- Virginian town, with a 
 monthly magazine, which he printed himself and 
 edited with the help of his sister. 
 
 As long as he remained in business he remained 
 a country editor and a country printer; he began 
 to study medicine when he was a young man, but 
 he abandoned it for the calling of his life without 
 regret, and, though with his speculative and in 
 ventive temperament he was tempted to experi 
 ment in other things, I do not think he would 
 ever have lastingly forsaken his newspaper for 
 them. In fact, the art of printing was in our 
 blood; it never brought us great honor or profit; 
 and we were always planning and dreaming to 
 get out of it, or get it out of us ; but we are all in 
 some sort bound up with it still. To me it is now 
 so endeared by the associations of childhood that 
 I cannot breathe the familiar odor of types and 
 presses without emotion ; and I should not be sur 
 prised if I found myself trying to cast a halo of 
 romance about the old-fashioned country office in 
 what I shall have to say of it here. 
 
 OUR first newspaper was published in south 
 western Ohio, but after a series of varying fortunes, 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 5 
 
 which I need not dwell upon, we found ourselves 
 in possession of an office in the northeastern 
 corner of the state, where the prevalent political 
 feeling promised a prosperity to one of my father s 
 antislavery opinions which he had never yet 
 enjoyed. He had no money, but in those days 
 it was an easy matter to get an interest in a 
 country paper on credit, and we all went gladly 
 to work to help him pay for the share that he 
 acquired in one by this means. An office which 
 gave a fair enough living, as living was then, 
 could be bought for twelve or fifteen hundred 
 dollars ; but this was an uncommonly good office, 
 and I suppose the half of it which my father took 
 was worth one sum or the other. Afterward, 
 within a few months, when it was arranged to 
 remove the paper from the village where it had 
 always been published to the county-seat, a 
 sort of joint-stock company was formed, and the 
 value of his moiety increased so much, nominally 
 at least, that he was nearly ten years paying 
 for it. By this time I was long out of the story, 
 but at the beginning I was very vividly in it, 
 and before the world began to call me with that 
 voice which the heart of youth cannot resist, 
 it was very interesting ; I felt its charm then, and 
 now, as I turn back to it, I feel its charm again, 
 
O THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 though it was always a story of steady work, 
 if not hard work. 
 
 The county-seat, where it had been judged 
 best to transfer the paper lest some other paper 
 of like politics should be established there, was a 
 village of only six or seven hundred inhabitants. 
 But, as the United States senator who was one 
 of its citizens used to say, it was "a place of great 
 political privileges." The dauntless man who 
 represented the district in the House for twenty 
 years, and who had fought the antislavery battle 
 from the first, was his fellow-villager and more 
 than compeer in distinction; and, besides these, 
 there was nearly always a state senator or repre 
 sentative among us. The county officers, of 
 course, lived at the county-seat, and the leading 
 lawyers, who were the leading politicians, made 
 their homes in the shadow of the court-house, 
 where one of them was presently elected to pre 
 side as judge of the common pleas. In politics, 
 the county was always overwhelmingly Free- 
 soil, as the forerunner of the Republican party 
 was then called; the Whigs had hardly gathered 
 themselves together since the defeat of General 
 Scott for the presidency; the Democrats, though 
 dominant in state and nation, and faithful to 
 slavery at every election, did not greatly out- 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 7 
 
 number among us the zealots called Comeouters, 
 who would not vote at all under a Constitution 
 recognizing the right of men to own men. Our 
 paper was Freesoil, and its field was large among 
 that vast majority of the people who believed 
 that slavery would finally perish if kept out of 
 the territories and confined to the old Slave 
 States. With the removal of the press to the 
 county-seat there was a hope that this field could 
 be widened till every Freesoil voter became a 
 subscriber. It did not fall out so ; even of those 
 who subscribed in the ardor of their political 
 sympathies, many never paid; but our list was 
 nevertheless handsomely increased, and num 
 bered fifteen or sixteen hundred. I do not know 
 how it may be now, but then most country papers 
 had a list of four or five hundred subscribers; a 
 few had a thousand, a very few twelve hundred, 
 and these were fairly decimated by delinquents. 
 We were so flown with hope that I remember there 
 was serious talk of risking the loss of the delin 
 quents on our list by exacting payment in advance; 
 but the measure was thought too bold, and we 
 compromised by demanding two dollars a year 
 for the paper, and taking a dollar and a half if 
 paid in advance. Twenty-five years later my 
 brother, who had followed my father in the busi- 
 
8 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 ness, discovered that a man who never meant to 
 pay for his paper would as lief owe two dollars 
 as any less sum, and he at last risked the loss of 
 the delinquents by requiring advance payment; 
 it was an heroic venture, but it was perhaps time 
 to make it. 
 
 The people of the county were mostly farmers, 
 and of these nearly all were dairymen. The few 
 manufactures were on a small scale, except 
 perhaps the making of oars, which were shipped 
 all over the world from the heart of the primeval 
 forests densely wooding the vast levels of the 
 region. The portable steam-sawmills dropped 
 down on the borders of the woods have long 
 since eaten their way through and through them, 
 and devoured every stick of timber in most 
 places, and drunk up the water-courses that the 
 woods once kept full; but at that time half the 
 land was in the shadow of those mighty poplars 
 and hickories, elms and chestnuts, ashes and 
 hemlocks; and the meadows that pastured the 
 herds of red cattle were dotted with stumps as 
 thick as harvest stubble. Now there are not 
 even stumps; the woods are gone, and the water 
 courses are torrents in spring and beds of dry 
 clay in summer. The meadows themselves have 
 vanished, for it has been found that the strong 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER Q 
 
 yellow soil will produce more in grain than in 
 milk. There is more money in the hands of the 
 farmers there, though there is still so little that 
 by any city scale it would seem comically little, 
 pathetically little; but forty years ago there was 
 so much less that fifty dollars seldom passed 
 through a farmer s hands in a year. Payment 
 was made in kind rather than in coin, and every 
 sort of farm produce was legal tender at the 
 printing-office. Wood was welcome in any quan 
 tity, for the huge box-stove consumed it with 
 inappeasable voracity, and then did not heat the 
 wide, low room which was at once editorial- 
 room, composing-room, and press-room. Perhaps 
 this was not so much the fault of the stove as of 
 the building. In that cold, lake-shore country 
 the people dwelt in wooden structures almost 
 as thin and flimsy as tents; and often in the first 
 winter of our sojourn the type froze solid with the 
 water which the compositor put on it when he 
 wished to distribute his case; the inking-rollers 
 had to be thawed before they could be used on 
 the press; and, if the current of the editor s soul 
 had not been the most genial that ever flowed in 
 this rough world, it must have been congealed 
 at its source. The cases of type had to be placed 
 very near the windows so as to get all the light 
 
IO THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 there was, and they got all the cold there was, 
 too. From time to time the compositor s fingers 
 became so stiff that blowing on them would not 
 avail; he passed the time in excursions between 
 his stand and the stove; in very cold weather 
 he practised the device of warming his whole 
 case of types by the fire, and, when it lost heat, 
 warming it again. The man at the press-wheel 
 was then the enviable man; those who handled 
 the chill, damp sheets of paper were no more 
 fortunate than the compositors. 
 
 II 
 
 THE first floor of our office-building was used 
 by a sash-and-blind factory; there was a machine- 
 shop somewhere in it, and a mill for sawing out 
 shingles; and it was better fitted to the exercise 
 of these robust industries than to the requirements 
 of our more delicate craft. Later, we had a more 
 comfortable place, in a new wooden "business 
 block," and for several years before I left it the 
 office was domiciled in an old dwelling-house, 
 which we bought, and which we used without 
 much change. It could never have been a very 
 luxurious dwelling, and my associations with it 
 are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than that 
 we were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER II 
 
 of that region is rough and fierce; and the lake 
 winds have a malice sharper than the saltest 
 gales of the North Shore of Massachusetts. I 
 know that there were lovely summers and love 
 lier autumns in my time there, full of sunsets of 
 a strange, wild, melancholy splendor, I suppose 
 from some atmospheric influence of the lake; 
 but I think chiefly of the winters, so awful to us 
 after the mild seasons of southern Ohio; the 
 frosts of ten and twenty below ; the village streets 
 and the country roads drowned in snow, the 
 consumptives in the thin houses, and the "slip- 
 pin ," as the sleighing was called, that lasted from 
 December to April with hardly a break. At 
 first our family was housed on a farm a little way 
 out, because there was no tenement to be had in 
 the village, and my father and I used to walk to 
 and from the office together in the morning and 
 evening. I had taught myself to read Spanish, 
 in my passion for Don Quixote, and I was then, 
 at the age of fifteen, preparing to write a life of 
 Cervantes. This scheme occupied me a good 
 deal in those bleak walks, and perhaps it was 
 because my head was so hot with it that my feet 
 were always very cold; but my father assured 
 me that they would get warm as soon as my 
 boots froze. If I have never yet written that life 
 
12 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 of Cervantes, on the other hand I have never 
 been quite able to make it clear to myself why my 
 feet should have got warm when my boots froze. 
 
 Ill 
 
 IT may have been only a theory of his; it may 
 have been a joke. He had a great many theories 
 and a great many jokes, and together these always 
 kept life interesting and sunshiny to him. With 
 his serene temperament and his happy doubt of 
 disaster in any form, he was singularly well fitted 
 to encounter the hardships of a country editor s 
 lot. But for the moment, and for what now 
 seems a long time after the removal of our paper 
 to the county-seat, these seem to have vanished. 
 The printing-office was the centre of civic and 
 social interest; it was frequented by visitors at 
 all times, and on publication day it was a scene 
 of gayety that looks a little incredible in the 
 retrospect. The place was as bare and rude as 
 a printing-office seems always to be: the walls 
 were splotched with ink and the floor littered 
 with refuse newspapers; but lured by the novelty 
 of the affair, and perhaps attracted by a natural 
 curiosity to see what manner of strange men the 
 printers were, the school-girls and young ladies 
 of the village flocked in and made it like a scene 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER l3 
 
 of comic opera, with their pretty dresses and 
 faces, their eager chatter and lively energy in 
 folding the papers and addressing them to the 
 subscribers, while our fellow-citizens of the place, 
 like the bassos and barytones and tenors of the 
 chorus, stood about and looked on with faintly 
 sarcastic faces. It would not do to think now 
 of what sorrow life and death have since 
 wrought for all those happy young creatures, 
 but I may recall without too much pathos the 
 sensation when some citizen volunteer relaxed 
 from his gravity far enough to relieve the 
 regular mercenary at the crank of our huge 
 power-press wheel, amid the applause of the 
 whole company. 
 
 We were very vain of that press, which replaced 
 the hand-press hitherto employed in printing 
 the paper. This was of the style and make of the 
 hand-press which superseded the Ramage press 
 of Franklin s time; but it had been decided to 
 signalize our new departure by the purchase of 
 a power-press of modern contrivance and of a 
 speed fitted to meet the demands of a subscrip 
 tion-list which might be indefinitely extended. 
 A deputation of the leading politicians accom 
 panied the editor to New York, where he went to 
 choose the machine, and where he bought a 
 
l4 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 second-hand Adams press of the earliest pattern 
 and patent. I do not know, or at this date I 
 would not undertake to say, just what principle 
 governed his selection of this superannuated 
 veteran; it seems not to have been very cheap; 
 but possibly he had a prescience of the disa 
 bilities which were to task his ingenuity to the 
 very last days of that press. Certainly no man 
 of less gift and skill could have coped with its 
 infirmities, and I am sure that he thoroughly 
 enjoyed nursing it into such activity as carried 
 it hysterically through those far-off publication 
 days. It had obscure functional disorders of 
 various kinds, so that it would from time to time 
 cease to act, and would have to be doctored by 
 the hour before it would go on. There was 
 probably some organic trouble, too, for, though 
 it did not really fall to pieces on our hands, it 
 showed itself incapable of profiting by several 
 improvements which he invented, and could, 
 no doubt, have successfully applied to the press 
 if its constitution had not been undermined. It 
 went with a crank set in a prodigious fly-wheel 
 which revolved at a great rate, till it came to the 
 moment of making the impression, when the 
 whole mechanism was seized with such a reluc 
 tance as nothing but an heroic effort at the crank 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER l5 
 
 could overcome. It finally made so great a 
 draught upon our forces that it was decided to 
 substitute steam for muscle in its operation, and 
 we got a small engine which could fully sym 
 pathize with the press in having seen better 
 days. I do not know that there was anything 
 the matter with the engine itself, but the boiler 
 had some peculiarities which might well mystify 
 the casual spectator. He could easily have sat 
 isfied himself that there was no danger of its 
 blowing up when he saw my brother feeding 
 bran or corn-meal into its safety-valve in order 
 to fill up certain seams or fissures in it which 
 caused it to give out at the moments of the great 
 est reluctance in the press. But still he must 
 have had his misgivings of latent danger of some 
 other kind, though nothing ever actually hap 
 pened of a hurtful character. To this day I do 
 not know just where those seams or fissures were, 
 but I think they were in the boiler-head, and 
 that it was therefore suffering from a kind of 
 chronic fracture of the skull. What is certain 
 is that, somehow, the engine and the press did 
 always get us through publication day, and not 
 only with safety, but often with credit; so that 
 not long ago, when I was at home, and my 
 brother and I were looking over an old file of 
 
l6 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 his paper, we found it much better printed than 
 either of us expected; as well printed, in fact, as if 
 it had been done on an old hand-press, instead of 
 the steam power-press which it vaunted the use 
 of. The wonder was that, under all the dis 
 advantages, the paper was ever printed on our 
 steam power-press at all; it was little short of 
 miraculous that it was legibly printed, and alto 
 gether unaccountable that such impressions as 
 we found in that file could come from it. Of 
 course, they were not average impressions; they 
 were the very best out of the whole edition, and 
 were as creditable as the editorial make-up of 
 the sheet. 
 
 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 edi 
 torial page, where my father had given his opinions 
 of the political questions which interested him, 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER IJ 
 
 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 portrai 
 ture 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 per 
 spective. 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 communica 
 tions 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 un 
 known. 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 
 
l8 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 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 exhausive; 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 Amer 
 ican 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 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER IQ 
 
 cared for our quarrels, and that those who fol 
 lowed 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 outshriek 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 
 county, 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 
 
20 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 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 vil 
 lages 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 de 
 fendants 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 COUNTRY PRINTER 21 
 
 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 ad 
 herents in the editorial columns, which did not 
 stir them, and again the most flattering offers to 
 take any kind of produce in payment of sub 
 scription. 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 after 
 ward, 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 sub 
 scription, and it was quite as if we had lost a 
 delinquent subscriber. 
 
22 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 V 
 
 UPON the whole, our paper was an attempt at 
 conscientious and self-respecting journalism; it 
 addressed itself seriously to the minds of its 
 readers; it sought to form their tastes and opin 
 ions. I do not know how much it influenced 
 them, if it influenced them at all, and as to any 
 effect beyond the circle of its subscribers, that 
 cannot be imagined, even in a fond retrospect. 
 But since no good effort is altogether lost, I am 
 sure that this endeavor must have had some tacit 
 effect; and I am sure that no one got harm from 
 a sincerity of conviction that devoted itself to 
 the highest interest of the reader, that appealed 
 to nothing base, and flattered nothing foolish 
 in him. It went from our home to the homes of 
 the people in a very literal sense, for my father 
 usually brought his exchanges from the office 
 at the end of his day there, and made his selec 
 tions or wrote his editorials while the household 
 work went on around him, and his children 
 gathered about the same lamp, with their books 
 or their jokes; there were apt to be a good many 
 of both. 
 
 Our county was the most characteristic of 
 that remarkable group of counties in northern 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 28 
 
 Ohio called the Western Reserve, and forty 
 years ago the population was almost purely 
 New England in origin, either by direct settle 
 ment from Connecticut, or indirectly after the 
 sojourn of a generation in New York State. 
 We were ourselves from southern Ohio, where the 
 life was then strongly tinged by the adjoining 
 life of Kentucky and Virginia, and we found these 
 transplanted Yankees cold and blunt in their 
 manners; but we did not undervalue their virtues. 
 They formed in that day a leaven of right think 
 ing and feeling which was to leaven the whole 
 lump of the otherwise proslavery or indifferent 
 state; and I suppose that outside of the anti- 
 slavery circles of Boston there was nowhere in 
 the country a population so resolute and so 
 intelligent in its political opinions. They were 
 very radical in every way, and hospitable to 
 novelty of all kinds. I imagine that they tested 
 more new religions and new patents than have 
 been even heard of in less inquiring communities. 
 When we came among them they had lately 
 been swept by the fires of spiritualism, which 
 left behind a great deal of smoke and ashes where 
 the inherited New England orthodoxy had been. 
 A belief in the saving efficacy of spirit phenomena 
 still exists among them, but not, I fancy, at all in 
 
24 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 the former measure, when nearly every household 
 had its medium, and the tables that tipped out 
 numbered the tables that did not tip. The old 
 New York Tribune, which was circulated in the 
 country almost as widely as our own paper, had 
 deeply schooled the people in the economics of 
 Horace Greeley, and they were ready for any 
 sort of millennium, religious or industrial, that 
 should arrive, while they looked very wisely after 
 the main chance in the mean time. They were 
 temperate, hard-working, hard-thinking folks, 
 who dwelt on their scattered farms, and came up 
 to the county fair once a year, when they were 
 apt to visit the printing-office and pay for their 
 papers. In spite of the English superstition to 
 the contrary, the average American is not very 
 curious, if one may judge from his reticence in 
 the presence of things strange enough to excite 
 question; and if our craft surprised these wit 
 nesses they rarely confessed it. 
 
 They thought it droll, as people of the simpler 
 occupations are apt to think all the more complex 
 arts; and one of them once went so far in expres 
 sion of his humorous conception as to say, after 
 a long stare at one of the compositors dodging 
 and pecking at the type in his case, "Like an 
 old hen pickin up millet." This sort of silence, 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 26 
 
 and this sort of comment, both exasperated the 
 printers, who took their revenge as they could. 
 They fed it full, once, when a country subscriber s 
 horse, tied before the office, crossed his hind- 
 legs and sat down in his harness like a tired man, 
 and they proposed to go out and offer him a 
 chair, to take him a glass of water, and ask him 
 to come inside. But fate did not often give them 
 such innings; they mostly had to create their 
 chances of reprisal, but they did not mind that. 
 
 There was always a good deal of talk going on, 
 but, although we were very ardent politicians, 
 the talk was not political. When it was not 
 mere banter, it was mostly literary; we disputed 
 about authors among ourselves and with the vil 
 lage wits who dropped in. There were several 
 of these who were readers, and they liked to 
 stand with their backs to our stove and challenge 
 opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and 
 Macaulay, Pope and Byron, Dickens and 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 It was Shakespeare who was oftenest on our 
 tongues; indeed, the printing-office of former 
 days had so much affinity with the theatre that 
 compositors and comedians were easily con 
 vertible; and I have seen our printers engaged 
 in hand-to-hand combats with column-rules, two 
 
26 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 up and two down, quite like the real bouts on 
 the stage. Religion entered a good deal into 
 our discussions, which my father, the most tol 
 erant of men, would not suffer to become irrev 
 erent, even on the lips of law students bathing 
 themselves in the fiery spirit of Tom Paine. He 
 was willing to meet any one in debate of moral, 
 religious, or political questions, and the wildest- 
 haired Comeouters, the most ruthless sceptic, the 
 most credulous spiritualist, found him ready to 
 take them seriously, even when it was hard 
 not to take them in joke. 
 
 It was part of his duty, as publisher of the 
 paper, to bear patiently with another kind of 
 frequenter the type of farmer who thought he 
 wished to discontinue his paper, and really 
 wished to be talked into continuing it. I think 
 he rather enjoyed letting the subscriber talk 
 himself out, and carrying him from point to point 
 in his argument, always consenting that he knew 
 best what he wanted to do, but skilfully per 
 suading him at last that a home-paper was more 
 suited to his needs than any city substitute. 
 Once I could have given the heads of his reason 
 ing, but they are gone from me now. The editor 
 was especially interested in the farming of the 
 region, and I think it was partly owing to the 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 27 
 
 attention he called to the question that its char 
 acter was so largely changed. It is still a dairy 
 country, but now it exports grain, and formerly 
 the farmers had to buy their flour. 
 
 He did not neglect any real local interest in 
 his purpose of keeping his readers alive to matters 
 of more general importance, but he was fortunate 
 in addressing himself to people who cared for 
 the larger, if remoter, themes he loved. In 
 fact, as long as slavery remained a question in 
 our politics, they had a seriousness and dignity 
 which the present generation can hardly imagine; 
 and men of ah 1 callings felt themselves uplifted 
 by the appeal this question made to their reason 
 and conscience. My father constantly taught in 
 his paper that if slavery could be kept out of the 
 territories it would perish, and, as I have said, this 
 was the belief of the vast majority of his readers. 
 They were more or less fervid in it, according 
 to their personal temperaments; some of them 
 were fierce in their convictions and some humor 
 ous, but they were all in earnest. The editor 
 sympathized more with those who took the true 
 faith gayly. All were agreed that the Fugitive- 
 slave Law was to be violated at any risk; it 
 would not have been possible to take an escaping 
 slave out of that county without bloodshed, but 
 
28 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 the people would have enjoyed outwitting his 
 captors more than destroying them. Even in 
 the great John Brown times, when it was known 
 that there was a deposit of his impracticable 
 pikes somewhere in our woods, and he and his 
 followers came and went among us on some 
 mysterious business of insurrectionary aim, the 
 affair had its droll aspects which none appre 
 ciated more keenly than the Quaker-born editor. 
 With his cheerful scepticism, he could never have 
 believed that any harm or danger would come of 
 it all; and I think he would have been hardly 
 surprised to wake up any morning and find 
 that slavery had died suddenly during the night 
 of its own iniquity. 
 
 He was like all country editors then, and I 
 dare say now, in being a printer as well as an 
 editor, and he took a full share in the mechan 
 ical labors. These were formerly much more 
 burdensome, for twice or thrice the present type 
 setting was then done in the country offices. At 
 the present day the country printer buys of a 
 city agency his paper already printed on one side, 
 and he gets it for the cost of the blank paper, 
 the agency finding its account in the advertise 
 ments it puts in. Besides this patent inside, as 
 it is called, the printer buys stereotyped selections 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 2Q 
 
 of other agencies, which offer him almost as wide 
 a range of matter as the exchange newspapers 
 he used to choose from. The few columns left 
 for local gossip and general news, and for what 
 ever editorial comment he cares to make on 
 passing events, can be easily filled up by two 
 compositors. But in my time we had three 
 journeymen at work and two or three girl- 
 compositors, and commonly a boy-apprentice 
 besides. The paper was richer in a personal 
 quality, and the printing-office was unquestion 
 ably more of a school. After we began to take 
 girl-apprentices it became coeducative, as far as 
 they cared to profit by it; but I think it did not 
 serve to widen their thoughts or quicken their 
 wits as it did those of the men. They looked 
 to their craft as a living, not as a life, and they 
 had no pride in it. They did not learn the whole 
 trade, as the journeymen had done, and served 
 only such apprenticeship as fitted them to set 
 type. They were then paid by the thousand 
 ems, and their earnings were usually as great at 
 the end of a month as at the end of a year. But 
 the boy who came up from his father s farm, 
 with the wish to be a printer because Franklin 
 had been one, and with the intent of making the 
 office his university, began by sweeping it out, 
 
3o THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 by hewing wood and carrying water for it. He 
 became a roller-boy, and served long behind the 
 press before he was promoted to the case, where 
 he learned slowly and painfully to set type. His 
 wage was forty dollars a year and two suits of 
 clothes, for three years, when his apprenticeship 
 ended, and his wander-years (too often literally) 
 began. He was glad of being inky and stained 
 with the marks of his trade; he wore a four- 
 cornered paper cap, in the earlier stages of his 
 service, and even an apron. When he became a 
 journeyman, he clothed himself in black doeskin 
 and broadcloth, and put on a silk hat and the 
 thinnest-soled fine boots that could be found, 
 and comported himself as much like a man of the 
 world as he knew how to do. His work brought 
 him acquainted with a vast variety of interests, 
 and kept his mind as well as hands employed; 
 he could not help thinking about them, and he did 
 not fail to talk about them. His comments had 
 generally a slightly acid flavor, and his constant 
 survey of the world, in the "map of busy life" 
 always under his eye, bred in him the contempt 
 of familiarity. He was none the less agreeable 
 for that, and the jokes that flew about from 
 case to case in our office were something the 
 editor would have been the last man to interfere 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 3l 
 
 with. He read or wrote on through them all, 
 and now and then turned from his papers to join 
 in them. 
 
 VI 
 
 THE journeyman of that time and place was 
 much better than the printer whom we had 
 known earlier and in a more lax civilization, 
 who was too apt to be sober only when he had 
 not the means to be otherwise, and who arrived 
 out of the unknown with nothing in his pocket, 
 and departed into it with only money enough to 
 carry him to the next printing-office. If we had 
 no work for him it was the custom to take up a 
 collection in the office, and he accepted it as a 
 usage of the craft, without loss of self-respect. 
 It could happen that his often infirmity would 
 overtake him before he got out of town, but in 
 this case he did not return for a second collection; 
 I suppose that would not have been good form. 
 Now and then a printer of this earlier sort ap 
 peared among us for a little time, but the air of 
 the Western Reserve was somehow unfriendly 
 to him, and he soon left us for the kindlier clime 
 of the Ohio River, or for the more southerly 
 region which we were ourselves sometimes so 
 homesick for, and which his soft, rolling accent 
 
32 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 so pleasantly reminded us of. Still, there was 
 something about the business perhaps the 
 arsenic in the type-metal which everywhere 
 affected the morals as it was said sometimes to 
 affect the nerves. 
 
 There was one of our printers who was a capital 
 compositor, a most engaging companion, and of 
 unimpeachable Western Reserve lineage, who 
 would work along in apparent perpetuity on 
 the line of duty, and then suddenly deflect from 
 it. If he wanted a day off, or several days, he 
 would take the time, without notice, and with a 
 princely indifference to any exigency we might 
 be in. He came back when he chose and of 
 fered to go to work again, and I do not 
 remember that he was ever refused. He was 
 never in drink; his behavior was the effect 
 of some obscure principle of conduct, unless it 
 was that moral contagion from the material he 
 wrought in. 
 
 I do not know that he was any more charac 
 teristic, though, than another printer of ours, 
 who was dear to my soul from the quaintness of 
 his humor and his love of literature. I think he 
 was, upon the whole, the most original spirit I 
 have known, and it was not the least part of his 
 originality that he was then aiming to become a 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 33 
 
 professor in some college, and was diligently 
 training himself for the calling in all the leisure 
 he could get from his work. The usual thing 
 would have been to read law and crowd forward 
 in political life, but my friend despised this com 
 mon ideal. We were both studying Latin, he 
 quite by himself, as he studied Greek and Ger 
 man, and I with such help as I could find in re 
 citing to a kindly old minister, who had forgotten 
 most of his own Latin, and whom I do not now 
 wish to blame for falling asleep over the lessons 
 in my presence; I did not know them well enough 
 to keep him up to the work. My friend and I 
 read the language, he more and I less, and we 
 tried to speak it together, to give ourselves con 
 sequence, and to have the pleasure of saying 
 before some people s faces what we should other 
 wise have said behind their backs; I should not 
 now undertake to speak Latin to achieve either 
 of these aims. Besides this, we read a great 
 deal together, mainly Shakespeare and Cer 
 vantes. I had a task of a certain number of 
 thousand ems a day, and when I had finished that 
 I was free to do what I liked; he would stop 
 work at the same time, and then we would take 
 our Don Quixote into some clean, sweet beech- 
 woods there were near the village, and laugh 
 
34 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 our hearts out over it. I can see my friend s 
 strange face now, very regular, very fine, and 
 smooth as a girl s, with quaint blue eyes, shut 
 long, long ago, to this dolce lome; and some day 
 I should like to tell all about him; but this is 
 not the place. When the war broke out he 
 left the position he had got by that time in some 
 college or academy farther west and went into 
 the army. One morning, in Louisiana, he was 
 killed by a guerilla who got a shot at him when 
 he was a little way from his company, and who 
 was probably proud of picking off the Yankee 
 captain. But as yet such a fate was unimagi 
 nable. He was the first friend of my youth; 
 he was older than I by five or six years; but we 
 met in an equality of ambition and purpose, 
 though he was rather more inclined to the 
 severity of the scholar s ideal, and I hoped to 
 slip through somehow with a mere literary use 
 of my learning. 
 
 VII 
 
 AS I have tried to say, the printers of that 
 day had nearly all some affinity with literature, 
 if not some love of it; it was in a sort always at 
 their fingers-ends, and they must have got some 
 touch of it whether they would or not. They 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 35 
 
 thought their trade a poor one moneywise, but 
 they were fond of it and they did not often for 
 sake it. Their hope was somehow to get hold 
 of a country paper and become editors and pub 
 lishers; and my friend and I, when he was twenty- 
 four and I eighteen, once crossed over into Penn 
 sylvania, where we had heard there was a paper 
 for sale; but we had not the courage to offer 
 even promises to pay for it. The craft had a 
 repute for insolvency which it merited, and it 
 was at odds with the community at large by reason 
 of something not immediately intelligible in it, 
 or at least not classifiable. I remember that 
 when I began to write a certain story of mine, I 
 told Mark Twain, who was once a printer, that 
 I was going to make the hero a printer, and he 
 said: "Better not. People will not understand 
 him. Printing is something ever village has in 
 it, but it is always a sort of mystery, and the 
 reader does not like to be perplexed by something 
 that he thinks he knows about." This seemed 
 very acute and just, though I made my hero a 
 printer all the same, and I offer it to the public 
 as a light on the anomalous relation the country 
 printer bears to his fellow-citizens. They see 
 him following his strange calling among them, 
 but to neither wealth nor worship, and they 
 
36 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 cannot understand why he does not take up some 
 thing else, something respectable and remunera 
 tive; they feel that there must be something 
 weak, something wrong in a man who is willing 
 to wear his life out in a vocation which keeps him 
 poor and dependent on the favor they grudge 
 him. It is like the relation which all the arts 
 bear to the world, and which is peculiarly thank 
 less in a purely commercial civilization like ours; 
 though I cannot pretend that printing is an art 
 in the highest sense. I have heard old journey 
 men claim that it was a profession and ought to 
 rank with the learned professions, but I am afraid 
 that was from too fond a pride in it. It is in one 
 sort a handicraft, like any other, like carpenter 
 ing or stone-cutting ; but it has its artistic delight, 
 as every handicraft has. There is the ideal in 
 all work; and I have had moments of unsurpassed 
 gladness in feeling that I had come very near 
 the ideal in what I had done in my trade. 
 This joy is the right of every worker, and in so 
 far as modern methods have taken it from him 
 they have wronged him. I can understand 
 Ruskin in his wish to restore it to some of 
 the handicrafts which have lost it in the "base 
 mechanical" operations of the great manufac 
 tories, where men spend their lives in mak- 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 87 
 
 ing one thing, or a part of a thing, and cannot 
 follow their work constructively. If that were 
 to be the end, the operative would forever lose 
 the delight in work which is the best thing in 
 the world. But I hope this is not to be the end, 
 and that when people like again to make things 
 for use and not merely for profit the workman 
 will have again the reward that is more than 
 wages. 
 
 I know that in the old-fashioned country 
 printing-office we had this, and we enjoyed our 
 trade as the decorative art it also is. Questions 
 of taste constantly arose in the arrangement of a 
 title-page, the display of a placard or a hand 
 bill, the use of this type or that. They did not 
 go far, these questions, but they employed the 
 critical faculty and the aesthetic instinct, and 
 they allied us, however slightly and unconsciously, 
 with the creators of the beautiful. 
 
 But now, it must be confessed, printing has 
 shared the fate of all other handicrafts. Thanks 
 to united labor, it is better paid in each of its 
 subdivisions than it once was as a whole. In my 
 time, the hire of a first-rate country printer, who 
 usually worked by the week, was a dollar a day; 
 but of course this was not so little in 1862 as it 
 would be in 1892. My childish remembrance 
 
38 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 is of the journeymen working two hours after 
 supper, every night, so as to make out a day of 
 twelve hours ; but at the time I write of the day 
 of ten hours was the law and the rule, and no 
 body worked longer, except when the Presi 
 dent s Message was to be put in type, or on 
 some other august occasion. 
 
 The pay is not only increased in proportion to 
 the cost of living, but it is really greater, and the 
 conditions are all very much better. But I 
 believe no apprentice now learns the whole trade, 
 and each of our printers, forty years ago, would 
 have known how to do everything in the kind of 
 office he hoped to own. He would have had to 
 make a good many things which the printer now 
 buys, and first among them the rollers which 
 are used for inking the type on the press. These 
 were of a composition of glue and molasses, and 
 were of an india-rubbery elasticity and consist 
 ency, as long as they were in good condition. 
 But with use and time they became hard, the 
 ink smeared on them, and they failed to impart 
 evenly to the type; they had to be thrown away 
 or melted over again. This was done on the 
 office stove, in a large bucket which they were 
 cut up into, with fresh glue and molasses added. 
 It seems in the retrospect to have been rather a 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 89 
 
 simple affair, and I do not now see why casting 
 a roller should have involved so much absolute 
 failure and rarely have given a satisfactory result. 
 The mould was a large copper cylinder, and the 
 wooden core of the roller was fixed in place by an 
 iron cap and foot-piece. The mixture boiled 
 away, as it now seems to me, for days, and far 
 into the sleepy nights, when as a child I was 
 proud of sitting up with it very late. Then at 
 some weird hour my father or my brother poured 
 it into the mould, and we went home and left 
 the rest with fate. The next morning the whole 
 office crowded round to see the roller drawn from 
 the mould, and it usually came out with such 
 long hollows and gaps in its sides that it had to 
 be cut up at once and melted over again. At 
 present, all rollers are bought somewhere in New 
 York or Chicago, I believe, and a printer would 
 no more think of making a roller than of making 
 any other part of his press. "And you know," 
 said my brother, who told me of this change, "we 
 don t wet the paper now." "Good Heavens," 
 said I, "you don t print it dry!" "Yes, and it 
 doesn t blur any more than if it were wet." I 
 suppose wetting the paper was a usage that ante 
 dated the invention of movable type. It used 
 to be drawn, quire by quire, through a vat of 
 
40 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 clear water, and then the night before publication 
 day it was turned and sprinkled. Now it was 
 printed dry, I felt as if it were time to class Ben 
 jamin Franklin with the sun-myths. 
 
 VIII 
 
 PUBLICATION day was always a time of 
 great excitement. We were busy all the morn 
 ing getting the last editorials and the latest news 
 in type, and when the paper went to press in the 
 afternoon the entire force was drafted to the work 
 of helping the engine and the press through their 
 various disabilities and reluctances. Several 
 hands were needed to run the press, even when it 
 was in a willing frame; others folded the papers 
 as they came from it; as many more were called 
 from their wonted work to address them to the 
 subscribers, for with the well-known fickleness of 
 their sex, the young ladies of the village ceased 
 to do this as soon as the novelty of the affair 
 wore off. Still, the office was always rather a 
 lively scene, for the paper was not delivered at 
 the village houses, and each subscriber came and 
 got his copy; the villagers began to come about 
 the hour we went to press, the neighboring 
 farmers called next day and throughout the week. 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER l 
 
 Nearly everybody who witnessed the throes of 
 our machinery had advice or sympathy to offer, 
 and in a place where many people were of a 
 mechanical turn the spectacular failure of the 
 editor s additions and improvements was naturally 
 a source of public entertainment; perhaps others 
 got as much pleasure out of his inventions as 
 he did. 
 
 Of course, about election-time the excitement 
 was intensified; we had no railroad or tele 
 graphic communication with the outer world, 
 but it was felt that we somehow had the news, 
 and it was known that we had the latest papers 
 from Cleveland, and that our sheet would report 
 the intelligence from them. After all, however, 
 there was nothing very burning or seething in 
 the eagerness of our subscribers. They could 
 wait; their knowledge of the event would not 
 change it, or add or take away one vote either 
 way. I dare say it is not so very different now, 
 when the railroad and the telegraph have made 
 the little place simultaneous with New York and 
 London. We people who fret our lives out in 
 cities do not know how tranquil life in the country 
 still is. We talk of the whirl and rush, as if it 
 went on everywhere, but if you will leave the 
 express train anywhere and pass five miles into 
 
42 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 the country, away from the great through lines, 
 you will not find the whirl and rush. People 
 sometimes go mad there from the dulness and 
 ennui, as in the cities they sometimes go mad 
 from the stress and the struggle; and the problem 
 of equalizing conditions has no phase more inter 
 esting than that of getting the good of the city 
 and the country out of the one into the other. 
 The old-fashioned country newspaper formed 
 almost the sole intellectual experience of the 
 remote and quiet folks who dwelt in their lonely 
 farmsteads on the borders of the woods, with 
 few neighbors and infrequent visits to the town 
 ship centre, where the church, a store or two, 
 and a tavern constituted a village. They got it 
 out of the post-office there once a week, and read 
 it in the scanty leisure left them by their farm- 
 work or their household drudgery, and I dare say 
 they found it interesting. There were some men 
 in every neighborhood, tongueyer than the rest, 
 who, when they called on us, seemed to have got 
 it by heart, and who were ready to defend or 
 combat its positions with all comers; this sort 
 usually took some other paper, too an agri 
 cultural paper, or the New York Trybune, as 
 they called it, or a weekly edition of a Cleveland 
 journal. It was generally believed that Horace 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 43 
 
 Greeley wrote everything in the Trybune, and 
 when a country subscriber unfolded his Trybune 
 he said, with comfortable expectation, "Well, 
 let s see what old Horace says this week." But 
 by far the greater number of our subscribers took 
 no paper but our own. I do not know whether 
 there is much more reading done now on the 
 farms, but I doubt it. In the villages, however, 
 the circulation of the nearest city dailies is pretty 
 general, and there is a large sale of the Sunday 
 editions. I am not sure that this is an advantage, 
 but in the undeniable decay of interest in the 
 local preaching, some sort of mental relish for 
 the only day of leisure is necessary. It is not so 
 much a pity that they read the Sunday papers, 
 as that the Sunday papers are so bad. If they 
 were carefully and conscientiously made up, 
 they would.be of great use; they wait their 
 reformer, and they do not seem impatient for 
 him. 
 
 In the old time, we printers were rather more 
 in touch with the world outside on the journalistic 
 lines than most of our fellow-villagers, but other 
 wise we were as remote as any of them, and the 
 weekly issue of the paper had not often anything 
 tumultuously exciting for us. The greatest 
 event of our year was the publication of the 
 
44 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 President s Message, which was a thrill in my 
 childish life long before I had any conception of 
 its meaning. I fancy that the patent inside, 
 now so universally used by the country papers, 
 originated in the custom which the printers 
 within easy reach of a large city had of supply 
 ing themselves with an edition of the President s 
 Message, to be folded into their own sheet, when 
 they did not print their outside on the back of it. 
 There was always a hot rivalry between the local 
 papers in getting out the message, whether it 
 was bought ready printed, or whether it was 
 set up in the office and printed in the body of 
 the paper. We had no local rival, but all the 
 same we made haste when it was a question of 
 the message. The printers filled their cases 
 with type, ready for the early copy of the mes 
 sage, which the editor used every device to 
 secure; when it was once in hand they worked 
 day and night till it was all up, and then the 
 paper was put to press at once, without regard 
 to the usual publication day; and the com 
 munity was as nearly electrified as could be with 
 our journalistic enterprise, which was more im 
 portant in our eyes than the matters the message 
 treated of. 
 There is no longer the eager popular expecta- 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 45 
 
 tion of the President s Message that there once 
 seemed to be; and I think it is something of a 
 loss, that ebb of the high tide of political feeling 
 which began with the era of our immense material 
 prosperity. It was a feeling that formed a sol 
 idarity of all the citizens, and if it was not always, 
 or often, the highest interest which can unite 
 men, it was at least not that deadly and selfish 
 cult of business which centres each of us in his 
 own affairs and kills even our curiosity about 
 others. Very likely people were less bent on the 
 pursuit of wealth in those days, because there 
 was less chance to grow rich, but the fact remains 
 that they were less bent in that direction, and 
 that they gave their minds to other things more 
 than they do now. I think those other things 
 were larger things, and that our civic type was 
 once nobler than it is. It was before the period 
 of corruption, when it was not yet fully known 
 that dollars can do the work of votes, when the 
 votes as yet rather outnumbered the dollars, and 
 more of us had the one than the other. The 
 great statesman, not the great millionaire, was 
 then the American ideal, and all about in the 
 villages and on the farms the people were eager 
 to know what the President had said to Congress. 
 They are not eager to know now, and that seems 
 
46 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 rather a pity. Is it because in the war which 
 destroyed slavery, the American Democracy 
 died, and by operation of the same fatal anomaly 
 the American Plutocracy, which Lincoln fore 
 boded, was born; and the people instinctively 
 feel that they have no longer the old interest in 
 President or Congress? 
 
 There are those that say so, and, whether they 
 are right or not, it is certain that into the great 
 centres where money is heaped up the life of the 
 country is drained, and the country press has 
 suffered with the other local interests. The 
 railroads penetrate everywhere, and carry the 
 city papers seven times a week, where the home 
 paper pays its tardy visit once, with a patent 
 inside imported from the nearest money centre, 
 and its few columns of neighborhood gossip, 
 too inconsiderable to be gathered up by the corre 
 spondents of the invasive dailies. Other causes 
 have worked against the country press. In 
 counties where there were once two or three 
 papers there are now eight or ten, without a 
 material increase of population to draw upon 
 for support. The county printing, which the 
 paper of the dominant party could reckon upon, 
 is now shared with other papers of the same 
 politics, and the amateur printing-offices be- 
 
THE COUNTRY PRINTER 4? 
 
 longing to ingenious boys in every neighborhood 
 get much of the small job-work which once came 
 to the publisher. 
 
 It is useless to quarrel with the course of events, 
 for which no one is more to blame than another, 
 though human nature loves a scape-goat, and 
 from time to time we load up some individual 
 with the common sins and drive him into a wilder 
 ness where he seems rather to enjoy himself than 
 otherwise. I suppose that even if the conditions 
 had continued favorable, the country press could 
 never have become the influence which our editor 
 fondly hoped and earnestly strove to make it. 
 Like all of us who work at all, the country printer 
 had to work too hard; and he had little time to 
 think or to tell how to make life better and truer 
 in any sort. His paper had once perhaps as 
 much influence as the country pulpit; its support 
 was certainly of the same scanty and reluctant 
 sort, and it was without consecration by an 
 avowed self-devotion. He was concerned with 
 the main chance first, and after that there was 
 often no other chance, or he lost sight of it. I 
 should not instance him as an exemplary man, 
 and I should be very far from idealizing him; 
 I should not like even to undertake the task of 
 idealizing a city journalist; and yet, in the retro- 
 
48 THE COUNTRY PRINTER 
 
 spect at least, the country printer has his pathos 
 for me the pathos of a man who began to 
 follow a thankless calling because he loved it, 
 and kept on at it because he loved it, or else 
 because its service had warped and cramped him 
 out of form to follow any other. 
 
ARRANGED AND PRINTED BY 
 
 THE PLIMPTON PRESS 
 
 NORWOOD 
 
 MASS 
 
 u-s 
 
 A 
 
BOOKS BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 
 
 ANNIE KILBURN. 
 
 APRIL HOPES. 
 
 BETWEEN THE DARK AND 
 
 DAYLIGHT. 
 BOY LIFE. 
 
 BOY S TOWN. 
 
 CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH 
 
 TOWNS. 
 
 CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY, AND 
 OTHER STORIES. 
 
 COAST OF BOHEMIA. 
 
 CRITICISM AND FICTION. 
 
 DAY OF THEIR WEDDING. 
 
 FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS. 
 
 FENNEL AND RUE. 
 
 FLIGHT OF PONY BAKER. 
 
 HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 HEROINES OF FICTION. 
 
 IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS. 
 
 IMPERATIVE DUTY. 
 
 IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERI 
 ENCES. 
 
 KENTONS. 
 
 LANDLORD AT LION S HEAD. 
 
 LETTERS HOME. 
 
 LITERARY FRIENDS AND 
 ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 LITERATURE AND LIFE. 
 
 LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN. 
 
 LONDON FILMS. 
 
 MISS BELLARD S INSPIRATION. 
 MODERN ITALIAN POETS. 
 MOTHER AND THE FATHER. 
 
 MOUSE-TRAP, A LIKELY 
 
 STORY, THE GARROTERS, 
 FIVE-O CLOCK TEA. 
 
 MY LITERARY PASSIONS. 
 
 MY MARK TWAIN. 
 
 MY YEAR IN A LOG CABIN. 
 
 OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY. 
 
 PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS. 
 
 PARTING AND A MEETING. 
 
 QUALITY OF MERCY. 
 
 QUESTIONABLE SHAPES. 
 
 RAGGED LADY. 
 
 ROMAN HOLIDAYS. 
 
 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES. 
 
 SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 SON OF ROYAL LANGBRITH. 
 
 STOPS OF VARIOUS QUILLS. 
 
 STORY OF A PLAY. 
 
 THE DAUGHTER OF THE 
 
 STORAGE. 
 THE SEEN AND UNSEEN AT 
 
 STRATFORD-ON-AVON . 
 THEIR SILVER WEDDING 
 
 JOURNEY. 
 THROUGH THE EYE OF A 
 
 NEEDLE. 
 
 TRAVELLER FROM ALTRURIA. 
 WORLD OF CHANCE. 
 YEARS OF MY YOUTH. 
 
 Farces 
 
 A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION. 
 
 A LIKELY STORY. 
 A PREVIOUS ENGAGEMENT. 
 EVENING DRESS. 
 FIVE-O CLOCK TEA. 
 
 PARTING FRIENDS. 
 
 THE ALBANY DEPOT. 
 
 THE GARROTERS. 
 
 THE MOUSE-TRAP. 
 
 THE UNEXPECTED GUESTS. 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 BERKELEY 
 
 Return to desk from which borrowed 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
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 W 8* "86 -CM 
 
 JAN IV .- 
 
 171995 
 
 ! 1963 IREC.CIRC. FEB 0?. 
 
 18Nov 64h 
 
 LD2 l_100m-9, 4S(B3998l6)476 
 
BERKELEY LIBRARI 
 
 CDS133733b 
 
 M 9403 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY