238 MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. 



to take another holiday. Oh! why didn't you tell me you didn't know anything 

 about agriculture?" 



" Tell you, you cornstalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower? It's the first 

 time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark. I tell you I have been in the editorial 

 business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man's 

 having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper. You turnip! Who write 

 the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted 

 shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting 

 as I do about good farming and no more. Who review the books ? People who 

 never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders on finance ? Parties who have had 

 the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticise the Indian 

 campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who 

 never have had to run a foot race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several 

 members of their families to build the evening camp-fire with. Who write the 

 temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never 

 draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave. Who edit the agricultural 

 papers, you — yam ? Men, as general thing, who fail in the poetry line, yellow- 

 colored novel line, sensation-drama line, city-editor line, and finally fall back on 

 agriculture as a temporary reprieve from the poorhouse. You try to tell me 

 anything about the newspaper business ! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha 

 to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes 

 and the higher the salary he commands. Heaven knows if I had but been 

 ignorant instead of cultivated, and impudent instead of diffident, I could have made 

 a name for myself in this cold selfish world. I take my leave, sir. Since I have 

 been treated as you have treated me, I am perfectly willing to go. But I have done 

 my duty. I have fulfilled my contract as far as I was permitted to do it. I said I 

 could make your paper of interest to all classes — and I have. I- said I could run 

 your circulation up to twenty thousand copies, and if I had had two more weeks I'd 

 have done it. And I'd have given you the best class of readers that ever an 

 agricultural paper had — not a farmer in it, nor a solitary individual who could tell 

 a water-melon tree trom a peach-vine to save his life. You are the loser by this 

 rupture, not me. Pie-plant. Adios." 



I then left. 



