Page:1880. A Tramp Abroad.djvu/649

 small pica lines, and is lighted up with eight pica head-lines. The bill of fare is as follows: First, under a pica head-line, to enforce attention and respect, is a four line sermon urging mankind to remember that although they are pilgrims here below, they are yet heirs of heaven; and that "When they depart from earth they soar to heaven," Perhaps a four-line sermon in a Saturday paper is the sufficient German equivalent of the eight or ten columns of sermons which the New Yorkers get in their Monday morning papers. The latest news (two days old), follows the four-line sermon, under the pica head-line "Telegrams,"—these are "telegraphed" with a pair of scissors out of the Augsburger Zeitung of the day before. These telegrams consist of fourteen and two-thirds lines from Berlin, fifteen lines from Vienna, and two and five-eighths lines from Calcutta. Thirty-three small pica lines of telegraphic news in a daily journal in a King's Capital of 170,000 inhabitants, is surely not an over-dose. Next, we have the pica heading, "News of the Day," under which the following facts are set forth: Prince Leopald is going on a visit to Vienna, six lines; Prince Arnulph is comming [sic] back from Russia, two lines; the Landtag will meet at 10 o'clock in the morning and consider an election law, three lines and one word over; a city government item, five and one-half lines; prices of tickets to the proposed grand Charity Ball, twenty-three lines,—for this one item occupies almost one-fourth of the entire first page; there is to be a wonderful Wagner concert in Frankfurst-on-the-Main, with an orchestra of one hundred and eight instruments, seven and one-half lines. That concludes the first page. Eighty-five lines, altogether, on that page, including three head-lines. About fifty of those lines, as one perceives, deal with local matters; so the reporters are not over-worked.

Exactly one-half of the second page is occupied with an opera-criticism, fifty-three lines (three of them being head-lines), and "Death Notices," ten lines.

The other half of the second page is made up of two paragraphs under the head of "Miscellaneous News." One of these paragraphs tells about a quarrel between the Czar of Russia and his eldest son, twenty-one and a half lines; and the other tells about the atrocious destruction of a peasant child by its parents, forty lines, or one-fifth of the total of the reading matter contained in the paper.