Mark Twain As A Printer

At a banquet of New Vork printen the ottaer nlrtt in commemoratlon of Pranklin's birthday, Mark Twala responded to the toü8t, "The Compositor," asfollows: "lam stafgeretl by the complánenla whiuli have been lavished and poured out on me bymyfrlend on my rifflit, Mr. Balie] ]. I iiin ;is proud ut' this compliment is I hui ttaggerad. It Is uncommon in myexperlenee. It N tbe lir-ttimc Unit any body In my ezperlence lias stood np in the presance of a largc and respectable assemblages of gentlemen like thls, and confessed tlnit I have told the truth onee. It I could retara tbe compliment I would do it. [J,aughter at Mr. IJailey's expense ) " Tbe feheirman'a historical reminicences of Guten berg have caused me to fall into reininisceuces for I, myself, am somet li i ti tr of au antiquity. [Laujfhter.] All thin cliaiic in the procession of years, and l may lie that I am amoug itnuupn. Ii may be that tbe printer of to-dny is not the printer of 35 years ugo. I wal DO -.Hanger to him. I knew hun well. I built bis lire for liiui in tl 10 winter uioi nings; I brougbt his water trom tbe villai;' pump; 1 swepi out bis office; I piek ed np hls type fioni under bis stand ; and, if he was tberc to see, I put the good type in bis case and the broken ones among the ' heil matter,' and, if he wasn't there to see, I dumpl it all with the ' pi ' on the imposing tone - for that was the furiive fashion of the cub, and 1 was a cub. I wetted down the paper Saturdays; I tnrned it Öiiudays, for tliis was a country ucikly; I rolled, I washed the rollers, I vahed the forms, I folded the papers, I carried them around at dawn 'fhursday mornings. I enveloped tbe papers that wei e for the mail - we had a huudred town subscribe rs and 3."0 country oues; the town subscribers paid in groceri'es and the country ones in cabbage and cordwood, whea ilnv paid at all, which was merely soinetime9, and then we always stated tbe fact in the pnper and gave them a pull', and if we foi-jot it they stoppcd the paper. Every man on tbe town list helped edit the thing; that is, he gave orders as to how it was to be edlted ; diotated its opiuions, inarked out its course for it, and every time the boss failed to conneet he stopped his paper. We were just Infeeted with eriiics,and we tried tosatisfy them all over. We had one subscriber wbo paid c.ish, and hu was more troubleto ug than all tbe rest. He bougbt us, once a year, body and soul, tbr $$. He used to modity our politics every which way, and he made us cbange our religión tour times in five years. If weevertried to reason with him, he would threaten to stop bis paper, and of course, Ihat meant bankruptey and destruclion. That man used to wiite articles a column and a half long, leaded long primer, and sign them 'Junius' or ' Veritas'or ' Vox Populi,' or some other higb-sounding rot, and, after it was set lip, be come in and said hc had changed his mind - which was a gilded ligure of speech, .because he hadn't any- and ordered it to be lelt out. We couldn't stand such a waste as that; wc couldn't aftbrd 'bogus' in tbat office, so we always took the leads out, altered the slgnature, creuited tbe article to the rival paper in the next vlllage, and put it in. ¦' Well, we did have one or two kinds of ' bogus.' Whenever there was a barbecue, or a circus or a baptizing we knocked off half a day, and theu to make up tor short matter, we would 'turn over ads' - turn over tbe whole page and duplícate it. Tbe other bogus was deep, philosophical stuti, which we judged nobody ever read; so we kept a galley of it standing and kept on slapning the same oíd batches of it in, every now and then, till it got dangerous. Also, in the earlv days of the telegi aph we used to economizo on the news. We picked out the items that wcre pointless or barren of Information and stood them on a galley and changed tbc dates and localities and used them over and over again till the pubbc interest in them was worn to the bone. We marked the ads but we seldom paid any attention to the marks afterward ; so tbe lite of a 'td' ad and a 'tf ' ad was equally eternal. I have seen a ' td ' notice of a sheriff 's saleslill booniinfrserenely along two years after the sale was over, tbe sheriff dead, and the whole circumstance becimie ancient history. Most of the yearly ida were patent medicine stereotypes, and we used to lencewith them. Life waseasy with us; if we pied a forin we suspende il till next week, and we always suspended every now and then when the lishing was good, and explained it by the lllness of the editor, a paltry excuse, because that kind ot a paper was just as well off wilh a lick editor us a well one, and better off with a dead one than witli either of them. He was fu 11 of blessed egotism and pi acid sell-importance, but he didn't know U mucb as a three-cm ([liad. He ncver set anv type except in the rush of the last day, and then he would smouch all tbe poetrv and leave the rest to 'jeff' for the solid takes. He u rote with impressive llatulence and Marine confidenec upon tbe vastest subjects ; but pufflng almsgiftsof wedding oake, xalty ice cream, abnormal watermeloMs and sweet potutocs the size of your leg was his best hold. He was always a poet- a kind of poet of the carricr's address brood - and wbenever his iaintellect suppuratcd, and he read the reBult to the printers and askcd for thelr opinión, they were frank and straigbtfoiwiiid about it. They generally scraped their rules on the boxesall the time he was reading. and called it ' hog wash ' when he got througb. All this was 35 years ago, and when the man who set 700 an hour Could pul on just as many airs as he wanted to; and if those New Vork men wbo rccently on a wager set 2,000 au hour solid niinion for four hoiirs on a sttctrli had apptared in that offlot t lic y would have been reccived as acoomplllben of tlu suprctnciv Impoasible, anddrencbed with hospitable beer uutil the brewers were liankiupt. " I can see that printing office of prehistorie times yet, with its borle bilis on the walls, its 'd' boxes cloggcd with tallow, liiuause we always stood the candle in tbe ' k' box nights, its towel, wbich was not contldered soiied until it could stand alone, and other n;;iis and symbols that inarked the establisbments of tbat kind in the Mississippi valley, and I can also ncc tbc trampillé 'j"iu' wbo Ilitted by in tbe Slimmer and tanied B day, with bil wallet NtiilVcd wltÜ one shirt and tl hatful of 'handblIN ; ur if hc COUldn t rct any type te wl be would do i temperance leoture. lli way of Ufe was simple, bis needs not complex ; all he wanted was plate and bed and moiicy enongh to get dm. ik on and he was sittislied. Hut it may bc, as 1 have Raid, that I am among stranjrers, and s'iiik tbe glories ot a forgotten age to iiiifainiliar ears, so I will ' niakc even.' and stoi.''