Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 105.djvu/160

Rh very little show upon paper. No wonder, then, the editor is so often "not in" to all comers.

The next day, Friday, is worse than the preceding. The only consolation is, that it is the last.But how to tide over the stream of toil and trouble, which, the editor may be sure, will not run itself dry? The editor must be at his post betimes in the morning; yet, early as he may be, he can never be too early—the work is ever before him. To speak compendiously, the life of a country newspaper editor consists in doing a day's work in three days at the beginning of the week, and three days' work in one day at the end of the week. When he leaves home on Friday morning, then, it is with very little hope of seeing it again until the morrow morning, especially if he should have the good fortune to live out of the smoke of the town, and beyond its noise, even though within ear-shot of its harmonised hum. He eats and drinks at the office on the day before publication; and a wife will sometimes say, a little sarcastically, though more compassionately, that he had better sleep there also. He does, i'faith, sometimes, though there is no time for sleep; he catches himself napping when overtaken by night. But I am stepping ahead of my story. When the editor reaches the office, he finds awaiting him a pile of letters on all imaginable subjects; a heap of newspapers, from which the latest news has to be gleaned; and, generally, a file of memoranda for paragraphs which must be written. He very soon discovers that he has more matter than the paper will contain, although he has thrown aside "A Patriot," "A Sufferer," and "An Admirer," and other long-winded heroes, like so much rubbish. At the moment when he wants most space to make the newspaper complete, he finds that there is least to spare. Selections from other newspapers (old) are in type, and stopping the way of better matter (new). The counting-house, too, is pumping a stream of copy into the printing-office, quite independently of him—I mean advertisements, and these take precedence of news, because they pay best. Now commences the editor's "slaughter of the innocents." There will not be room for one article because it is so long; for another, because it is comparatively unimportant; and it is a "gone goose" with the third, because there will not be time to dish it up properly for the public. Other articles, again, are rejected because there is no time to consider them, or because they are badly written, and the printers have no time to lose in bungling over hieroglyphics. The overseer now sees that he will have too much matter; and although all the week he has been declaring that he has been kept short of copy, now goes on the opposite tack, to avoid upsetting, or, as he says, "oversetting." The editor is anxious to get in all the latest news, but the overseer furtively tries to get rid of it, because he has enough matter, although it is of the stalest, to fill the paper. The editor's work often progresses like the boy going to school on a frosty day—one step forward and two steps backward. He has no sooner prepared an article or a batch of news, when a long advertisement arrives, and that must go in, to the exclusion