48 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 



The chief turned to me and said, " I am expecting company to dinner, and shall 

 have to get ready. It will be a favbr to me if you will read proof and attend to 

 the customers." 



I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I was too'bewil- 

 dered by the "fusilade that was still ringing in my ears to think of anything to say. 



He continued, " Jones will be here at 3 — cowhide him. Gillespie will call 

 earlier, perhaps — throw him out of the window. Ferguson will be along about 4 — 

 kill him. That is all for to-day, I believe. If you have any odd time, you may 

 write a blistering article on the police — give the Chief Inspector rats. The cow-, 

 hides are under the table ; weapons in the drawer — ammunition there in the corner 

 — lint and bandages up there in the pigeon-holes. In case of accident, go to' Lancet, 

 the surgeon, down-stairs. He advertises — we take it out in trade." 



He was gone. I shuddered. At the end of the next three hours I had been 

 through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were gone from 

 me. Gillespie had called and thrown me out of the window. Jones arrived 

 promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took the job oif my hands. 

 In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, I had lost my scalp. 

 Another stranger, by the name of Thompson, left me a mere wreck and ruin of 

 chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of 

 editors, blacklegs, politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished 

 their weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of steel, 

 I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief arrived, and 

 with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends. Then ensued a scene of 

 riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one either, could describe. People 

 were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up, thrown out of the window. There was 

 a brief tornado of murky blasphemy, with a confused and frantic war-dance glim- 

 mering through it, and then all was over. In five minutes there was silence, and 

 the gory chief and I sat alone and surveyed the sanguinary ruin that strewed the 

 floor around us. 



He said, " You'll like this place when you get used to it." 



I said, " I'll have to get you to excuse me ; I think maybe I might write to suit 

 you after a while ; as soon as I had had some practice and learned the language 

 I am confident I could. But, to speak the plain truth, that sort of energy of 



