A Picturesque Penny-a-Liner
There may be some miserable beings to whom the existence of that powerful organ of public opinion, the Stretchville Sparrow, is a sealed volume, or, more correctly, an unopened newspaper. Should such be the melancholy fact, I hasten to inform them that the Stretchville Sparrow (vide its own circular) is a power, a forty-horse power, in the universe. Circulating, as it does, among the three hundred adults of Stretchville and vicinity, it wields an influence that inspires awe and creates astonishment. As befits a journal with responsibilities so tremendous, and a status so imposing, it aims to keep abreast of the times. So when the Land League agitation had brought Ireland and the Irish prominently forward, and such lesser luminaries as the New York Herald and Tribune and Times and the Boston Herald and a score of other dailies had their specials over in the sorrowful country, the Sparrow felt imperatively called upon to bestow its approval by following the example. Stubbs, the head reporter, bookkeeper, advertisement canvasser, and proof-reader, was therefore ordered to hold himself in readiness to embark on a perilous journey (via the editorial back room) through the wilds of Connemara and the mountains of Kerry. He was equipped for the expedition with a school map of Ireland and an old copy of Thom’s Dublin Directory, which contained a list of all the landed gentry of the country.
His instructions were brief, but they covered a lot of ground. “You know as much about the country now,” observed his chief, “as if you were there. We’ve got to lick the New York Herald and the rest of ’em. Whenever you see an Irish murder in another paper, let us have two. There’s nearly two thousand names in that directory. With judicious management they ought to last till this Irish boom pegs out. You’d better tick each landlord off when you telegraph his demise. It won’t do to shoot one fellow three or four times. People want variety. You might skin a bailiff or scalp a policeman now and then. Go ahead at once, and give us some lively telegrams.”
Well, it was lively for a few weeks after that in the Sparrow. One day we had: “Fearful Murders in Ireland—Seven Landlords Shot!” The next there was a six-inch heading, “Cannibalism in Connemara—Six Agents Stewed and a Sub-Inspector Fricasseed!” Then when the Tribune came out with a summary of three months’ Irish outrages, and showed that there had been fourteen murders of agents and landlords, and one hundred and seven assaults upon bailiffs and process servers, that conscientious reporter, who had been told to double every crime reported elsewhere, and who didn’t grasp the fact that the Tribune’s was a three-months’ record, paralyzed the readers of the Sparrow with a blood-curdling telegram to the effect that there had been a horrible night’s battue in the Emerald Isle, twenty-eight landlords and agents having handed in their checks, and two hundred and fourteen officers of the law having suffered every conceivable indignity, from swallowing writs and processes on the half-shell, to being stripped naked and turned loose for light recreation in nettle beds or around wasps’ nests. By this time the special had got half through his directory, and the list of names eligible for assassination was rapidly dwindling down, so he had to improvise a few. His boss, too, complained that there was a lack of variety in his telegrams. He had wiped out four or five hundred land-owners in pretty nearly the same sentences every time. He should diversify the details. He diversified. Here’s his style:—
“Galway, Tuesday.—A man named M’Swilkin took a farm last week from which the previous tenant had been evicted. He was waited upon yesterday evening by a few neighbors. It is estimated that he weighed forty pounds heavier after the interview. The surgeons have been three days excavating for lead, and haven’t done striking new veins yet.”
“At a land-meeting near Castlebar last week, Michael Moolannigan boasted that he had paid his rent. His widow complains that she can’t hold a decent wake on a pair of braces and two buttons. She wants more of him, to give the funeral a respectable appearance.”
This special correspondence continued to be telegraphed from the editorial sanctum, and dated Sligo or Cahirciveen or Letterkenny, according to the scene of the last big thing in murders, until readers began to get kind of hardened to it, and didn’t mind half-a-dozen murders in Ireland quarter as much as they would the same number of errors in a base-ball match. Under the circumstances, it was thought as well to drop the Irish agency. “You had better return,” observed the chief, as they sat smoking together at the hospitable bar next door. “We’ll wind up your Irish tour with an interview. I’ll interview you. Just throw us in a few spicy maimings or strangulations for this issue, and you can be home next Saturday, and your interviewing will be handy for Sunday’s edition.” I give the interview as it appeared in the Sparrow, to show how scrupulously truthful was that Irish correspondent:—
“Yesterday, the gentleman who has represented us in Ireland, and whose energy enabled us to publish information which no other journal was in a position to obtain at that period or at any other, visited Stretchville. As we had not seen Mr. Blank before his departure for Hibernian shores, and were anxious to notice for ourselves what manner of man this was who for the past four months has been carrying his life in one hand, his repeater in the other, and his note-book and pencil in ——. But to abbreviate.
“We found him a pale, calm, intellectual-looking gentleman, upon whose brow the impress of truth and candor were stamped in Nature’s indelible marking-ink. He was accompanied by a miserable anatomy of a greyhound, whose spectral leanness was a miracle. It had no tail. The thin elongation of its body was so superlative that it seemed as if Nature had given up in despair the task of adding a caudal appendage in shadowy proportion to the other outlines. Our curiosity was excited, and we asked him how he came into possession of the canine ghost.
“‘I do not like telling the story,’ he answered; ‘I have a horror of being suspected of giving utterance to an untruth. But this mute witness will corroborate my tale by the want of his own. You remember I was down in the West of Ireland during the recent famine. My mission brought me into Ballykill—something or somebody. I never witnessed anything like the destitution among the landlords there in my life before. They were worn to threads.
“‘I was informed that on a moonlight night it took three of them to make a shadow. I would not have believed myself that less than a dozen could produce anything like a respectable shade.
“‘Well, one landlord, who had been master of the hounds, had only two of the pack left. He and his family had lived during the winter upon the others.
“‘The first of these two dogs, poor creature, fell to pieces trying to bark at me—just collapsed like a house of cards.
“‘The second animal you see with me. His sagacity was remarkable. He felt it his duty to bark at the stranger, but the fate of his companion warned him of the danger. So he leaned carefully against a wall, and succeeded in emitting a howl. I was struck by his extraordinary instinct. I bought him from his skeleton owner, a poor lath of a fellow you could blow out with a puff like a rush-light.
“‘I gave the man a shilling for him—in two sixpences, so that he could balance himself. If he had got the shilling to carry in either side pocket, it would have brought him down.
“‘I shall always take credit to myself for preserving that poor man’s centre of gravity.
“‘I brought the dog to my hotel. I left him in the dining-room, but, fearing he might slip under the door, I tied a double knot on his tail. In my brief temporary absence he smelt some scraps of meat in the bottom of a cupboard. He got through the keyhole as far as his tail. He couldn’t get the double knot through but he was able to reach the meat. He fed. You see the result. He could get no farther in, and after his feed he couldn’t get back past his stomach. I found him in that position when I returned. To save him from a lingering death, I had to vivisect his tail.’
“We ventured to hint that there might be a mistake about the double knot. The dog was of a breed whose tails are naturally short; so much so, that it would require hydraulic pressure to squeeze a double knot out of one. Our special was too virtuously indignant to reply for a moment, but, coming to, he explained that, going to rest supperless, the Irish landlords’ dogs had acquired a habit of sleeping with their tails in their mouths, which filled their minds with dreams of food. This had a tendency to lengthen out the canine latter end. ‘And, at any rate,’ concluded our contributor, ‘I would scorn to tell a lie for the sake of a knot on a dog’s tail!’”