“That ass, Blossom of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle-Cry of Freedom, is down here again, bumming his board at the Van Buren.

“We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity 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 villain, this hell-spawned miscreant, prostitutes his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation and degrading vulgarity. His paper is notoriously unfit to take into the people’s homes, and ought to be banished to the gambling hells and brothels where the mass of reeking pollution which does duty as its editor, lives and moves, and has his being.

“Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement—it wants a jail and a poor-house more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town with two gin-mills and a blacksmith shop in it, and that mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the Daily Hurrah! Better borrow of Memphis, where the article is cheap. The crawling insect, Buckner, who edits the Hurrah, is braying about this pavement business with his customary loud-mouthed imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense. Such foul, mephitic scum as this verminous Buckner, are a disgrace to journalism.

“That degraded ruffian Bascom, of the Dying Shriek for Liberty, fell down and broke his leg yesterday—pity it wasn’t his neck. He says it was ‘debility caused by overwork and anxiety!’ It was debility caused by trying to lug six gallons of forty-rod whisky around town when his hide is only gauged for four, and anxiety about where he was going to bum another six. He ‘fainted from the exertion of walking too much in the sun!’ And well he might say that—but if he would walk straight he would get just as far and not have to walk half as much. For years the pure air of this town has been rendered perilous by the deadly breath of this perambulating pestilence, this pulpy bloat, this steaming, animated tank of mendacity, gin and profanity, this Bascom! Perish all such from out the sacred and majestic mission of journalism!”

“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 middle of 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 moment afterward, with a dragoon revolver in his hand. He said: