Free The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain by Mark Twain, Charles Neider

well-nigh impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement. The
Daily Hurrah
urges the measure with ability, and seems confident of ultimate success.

    I passed my manuscript over to the chief editor for acceptance, alteration, or destruction. He glanced at it and his face clouded. He ran his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous. It was easy to see that something was wrong. Presently he sprang up and said:
    “Thunder and lighting! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such gruel as that? Give me the pen!”
    I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plow through another man’s verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he was in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window, and marred the symmetry of my ear.
    “Ah,” said he, “that is that scoundrel Smith, of the
Moral Volcano
—he was due yesterday.” And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and fired. Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith’s aim, who was just taking a second chance, and he crippled a stranger. It was me. Merely a finger shot off.
    Then the chief editor went on with his erasures and interlineations. Just as he finished then a hand-grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out.
    “That stove is utterly ruined,” said the chief editor.
    I said I believed it was.
    “Well, no matter—don’t want it this kind of weather. I know the man that did it. I’ll get him. Now,
here
is the way this stuff ought to be written.”
    I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till its mother wouldn’t have known it if it had had one. It now read as follows:

    SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS

    The inveterate liars of the
Semi-Weekly Earthquake
are evidently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack railroad. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side originated in their own fulsome brains—or rather in the settlings which they regard as brains. They had better swallow this lie if they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhiding they so richly deserve.
    That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville
Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom,
is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.
    We observe that the besotted blackguard of the
Mud Springs Morning Howl
is giving out, with his usual prosperity for lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journalism is to disseminate truth; to eradicate error; to educate, refine, and elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and holier, and happier; and yet this black-hearted scoundrel degrades his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.
    Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement—it wants a jail and a poorhouse more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town composed of two gin-mills, a blacksmith shop, and that mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the
Daily Hurrah!
The crawling insect, Buckner, who edits the
Hurrah, i
s braying about his business with his customary imbecility, and imagining he is talking sense.

    “Now
that
is the way to write—peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.”
    About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering crash, and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back. I moved out of range—I began to feel in the way.
    The chief said, “That was the Colonel, likely. I’ve been expecting him for two days. He will be up now right away.”
    He was correct. The Colonel appeared in the door a