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was stirring up the splendid but intellectually icism of somebody's negligence. And, indeed, irritable and unsociable animal in the tariff cage.

"And for one," remarked the sporting editor, with a burst of feeling, "I'm glad of it. The old man" (meaning, without disrespect or familiarity, the venerable editor-in-chief, whose special study was the tariff)" the old man has been writing that stuff so long, he believes, begad, he knows all about it. Just because nobody has ever tackled him before he thought he was dead right in everything he said about pig iron. I don't know who 's right, but I'll bet the drinks, begad, that he don't know as much about it as Longworth does."

Tom Kirby, the police reporter, agreed with Mr. Burke as far as the sporting editor concluded to go. It made Kirby sick, he confessed, to pick up the paper and see the editorial page loaded down with pig iron day after day. There was the old man writing it by the yard, when he, Kirby, would bet that he, the old man, had never seen an iron-furnace in his life. But, notwithstanding the failure of the old man to equip himself with a statistical knowledge of the cost of iron production by apprenticing himself as a puddler in his youth, Kirby was ready to bet his sweet life that the old man was "a dandy" and could write all around anybody else in the West on the tariff question.

This uncertain, but, on the whole, loyal and complimentary, sentiment regarding the old man was indorsed by the assembled judges of the local department, it is a pleasure to say, without a dissenting voice.

As has been declared, we never knew directly that it was Longworth who had interposed himself between the tariff editor and his man of straw, but we believed it firmly. By this time we had learned to know Longworth well. If his notes to the tariff editor had been published with Longworth's name attached it would have added little to the weight of conviction. The notes were not published, of course; for the very sensible and sufficient reason that the public ought to be satisfied with what the editor writes without reference to what may be said on the other side. What would be the use of a man devoting his life to journalism if every scribbler who came along were privileged to take issue with him?

In the local department we had long ago ceased publishing Longworth's communications and corrections. If we had continued to give them space they would have impeached the reliability of that great engine itself in which we were merely cogs, wheels, and connections. But though we secreted them, we did not despise them. They secretly furnished the city editor, many a time, the basis for a sharp crit

the entire staff were influenced by the intangible but undoubted presence of Longworth, and were writing more or less in view of and under the fear of Longworth. If the police reporter felt tempted to add any technical frills to the account of a post-mortem in a "threecolumn crime," he did so only after submitting his notes to the correction of a surgeon. Even Mr. Burke became singularly conscientious touching dates, and Mr. Forrest gradually ceased his reminiscences of the elder Booth, simply because all were challenged or discredited in some point by Longworth.

Only the amiable but unregenerate religious editor scorned and ignored him. Far from being chastened, corrected, or advised by Longworth's notes, the religious editor damned them with fervent vigor when they were laid upon his desk, and damned the mysterious Longworth along with them.

But though Longworth's notes were not published, they continued to arrive every day or two. They came regularly for years. They covered all imaginable subjects, and ruthlessly impeached countless statements that, nevertheless, continued to stand for facts. Longworth was recognized as a member-if a very irritating one-of the staff. At last everybody about the office who chanced to be in urgent need of information upon any subject was sarcastically advised to "Ask Longworth."

But we continued not to know who Longworth was any more than who was the man in the moon. Even the right hand of the city editor, the well-thumbed and faithful city directory, was silent upon the momentous question of his habitation, as it was of his name. His notes came steadily in the mails; but though we ignored them as to publication, we could not discourage Longworth's self-imposed resolution. That he did not finally appear in person and, as "an old and valued contributor," seek some personal benefit from his self-established intimacy with the paper, gave us cause for astonishment. There was the lady who had been selected by the local temperance union to contribute a column of temperance paragraphs to the Sunday edition, and who had been permitted to do so as a special favor: she was filling her column in three months with "puffs" of business houses; another lady, who wrote essays upon "Woman's Sphere" and was convinced that intellectual progress suddenly stood still when her essays were temporarily omitted; and still another lady, who had astonishingly frequent attacks of divine frenzy and came out of each with a manuscript poem that nobody understood - these came constantly in person and took such elaborate interest in the fate of their "copy" as would

have made of the managing editor a social pariah if the comments he uttered in private had been publicly circulated. And all of them enjoyed the conviction that their contributions entitled them to such favors as they freely asked in the puffing of numerous enterprises thinly veiled under the alluring name of charity. Longworth alone of all that band of selfinvited assistants continued laboriously, conscientiously, and ably to edit the waste-basket in silence and resignation.

Kirby, the police reporter, whose duties frequently constituted him a detective upon most embarrassing mysteries, and whose wonderful capacity for knowing a great deal about everybody had established him as a very remarkable person, could not throw any light upon the mystery of Longworth and his identity.

Out of this grew the usual slang jests. Anybody who volunteered information was "Longworth"; Webster's Unabridged was known as" the office Longworth"; the city directory was "the local Longworth." A patriarchal old printer in the job-printing department, whose benevolent face and appearance of extreme wisdom invited the joke, was commonly called "Longworth." Coming up with this elderly man one day in the elevator, the religious editor asked in a whisper of the sporting editor:

"Who is the old duck?"

"That," answered the sporting editor, as the old man stepped out on the next floor, and with a pitying smile, as if the information ought to be superfluous-"That? Why, that's Longworth."

Months afterward the staff learned with a shout of amusement that the guileless religious editor had been regularly addressing the elderly job printer as "Mr. Longworth" when they chanced to meet in the elevator. This discovery heaped ridicule and mortification upon the ingenuous youth, but he did not entirely succumb.

"I don't care," said he, affecting a smile that was not all an honest and spontaneous smile should be. "When I say, 'How d' ye do, Mr. Longworth,' he says, 'Pretty well, I thank you'; and if the name suits him I 'm blessed if it don't answer my purpose."

And it did. The elderly job printer had thenceforth no other name than Longworth. If he had taken pains to inform the whole staff that he possessed another, it is probable that the satisfaction of the slang would still have outweighed the truth of the suggestion.

But there was an end to Longworth, as there is to all other things; though what we thought at first to be the end was really only the beginning. And that beginning of the end was the sudden and complete cessation of

Longworth's notes. Was he ill? Or had he gone on a journey? Both explanations were suggested. Several weeks passed and the religious editor filed the fervent and unchristian hope that he was dead and housed hotly somewhere. But that portion of the staff engaged in embodying facts continued to gather and to write them in full fear of Longworth and with a keen appreciation of his sensitiveness on the subject, which in itself was a silent tribute to the salutary and profound effect of Longworth's unremitting labor. Silent as he was,-perhaps dead, at any rate missing,— the unconscious standard he had compelled continued to be the pole star by which those mariners upon the sea of current events steered their hazardous statements.

It is not the intention to slur truth in this narration, and it is only right, therefore, to admit that, as time passed, the embargo which Longworth had laid upon the imagination and the neglectfulness of the staff was gradually, and, eventually, entirely raised. Mr. Forrest resumed cautiously his reminiscences of the elder Booth, the sporting editor's opinionativeness increased, and even the tariff editor sailed a little farther away from the beacon lights of James Madison at every voyage.

The Longworth mystery was finally solved through the haughty dramatic critic. Panoplied with indignation at an assignment from the city editor to " go to the United States Court to-day and write a column characteristic sketch of the arraignment of moonshiners," Mr. Forrest went to his duty stoically and came back greatly pleased and patronizing in mood.

"Those moonshiners," said he to the city editor, "are worth about as many lines as will hold their names; but there was a case up on demurrer, or something of that sort, and there is a story in it that will make your hair curl."

"What is it all about?" inquired the city editor, who was not in primitive ignorance of the means resorted to by the various persons on the staff to give their discoveries a pretended value that was occasionally intrinsically lacking.

"All about Longworth," said Mr. Forrest, patronizingly and with a trace of annoyance in his tone, as he laid upon the city editor's table a handful of notes labeled: “Tabitha J. Longworth vs. the Order of Good Friends."

"Well, what has Longworth been doing?" asked Mr. Forrest's chief, with a tinge of authority and brusqueness in his manner.

"Oh, nothing particularly," snapped out the dramatic critic, with a sneer in his voice, "but to marry and shamelessly deceive two trusting women, involve a noble charitable order in costly litigation, and write a lot of insuf

ferably impertinent notes to his betters on this paper for the past seven years.”

"ROBERT LONGWORTH!" cried the city editor in the unmistakable capital letters of great astonishment.

For answer Mr. Forrest again affected annoyance, and asked if it would be necessary for him to make an affidavit to support the truth of what he had already said.

But the little personal throes of pride, of triumph, and of ill-nature that attend the oiling of the great engine of information are not to be idly exhibited to the public; and it is enough to say that after those throes had subsided in this instance the staff of the "Democratic Banner" were soon seething with curiosity as to Longworth and his duplicity. Only brief and detached outlines had been given by Mr. Forrest, who, with a masterly and supreme affectation of indifference, began early in the evening to compose the "story" that his fellow journalists awaited so eagerly.

The details of Mr. Forrest's story will not be given here. Most of its interest was due to his powerful and inimitable style, and only the entire narrative as he wrote it would preserve that for full appreciation. It must be owned that it was one of the most brilliant efforts of his facile pen, and those who desire to read it may refer to the files of the "Democratic Banner," where Mr. Forrest revealed the mystery and the crime of Robert Longworth, under the captions of

A VILLAIN UNVEILED!

memorable "scoop" upon one of the most loathsome of contemporaries will find standing out boldly in the three columns of leaded minion with which, in the figurative and highly colored language of the religious editor, the "Democratic Banner" "paralyzed that old fraud" at last.

As briefly as possible it may be explained that Longworth was undoubtedly a bigamist. He had, many years before, clandestinely married a well-to-do widow in a Pennsylvania town, and had expended much of her means in attempting to establish a newspaper. He had then left to seek an opening in the West and had never returned to his deserted wife. True, he had maintained a most ingenious and constant correspondence with her, which did not cease even in the happy period when he was enjoying another honeymoon with a second well-to-do and unsuspecting widow. Supporting a most elaborate falsehood and a most ingenious system of detail with his first wife, he had evidently mailed his letters to her from a suburb across the river, while he was as plainly residing in the city. The end came to this fragile fabric when Robert Longworth took passage on the steamboat Evening Star, on that memorable night when her boilers exploded and the souls of forty-six excursionists never returned to complain of crowded accommodations. True, his body was never recovered, nor had his name appeared in the list of the lost published in the "Democratic Banner's" splendid account of that deplorable tragedy - an account so infinitely superior to the miserably inaccurate and poorly

ONE OF THE MOST SURPRISING STORIES IN LEGAL written story in our loathsome contemporary as

ANNALS.

The Unparalleled and Criminal Duplicity of Robert Longworth, who Broke Two Hearts and Cruelly Threw One Away.

A STORY OF FACT RIVALING IN ROMANCE AND MYSTERY THE PLOT OF THE MOST

IMPROBABLE NOVEL!

In denouncing Longworth's duplicity Mr. Forrest wrote with all the vigorous and picturesque interjectiveness that small capital "sub-heads" skillfully placed could lend to a style whetted and nerved by recollections of Longworth's ruthless corrections of certain more or less smuggled reminiscences of the elder Booth. It must be admitted that while Mr. Forrest wrote with venom he wrote, also, with certain power.

THOSE DAMNING RECORDS,

HIS BASILISK EYES,

A MYSTERIOUS SECRET,

are some of the catch-lines in small capitals that the reader who cares to look up this

to stand out as one of the greatest achievements in Western journalism. This is not said in mere vainglory, but is a well-attested fact, due to the presence on board the ill-starred boat of one of the "Democratic Banner's " reporters, who swam triumphantly ashore on a hencoop and walked four miles to a telegraph office to send his report, while our miserable contemporary was forced to content itself with the untrained hearsay of a country correspond

ent.

But though his name was not in the death list Robert Longworth had disappeared in that disaster, and his widow-or, to speak more accurately, his second widow-had promptly received from the Order of Good Friends, of which he was a member, the sum always paid to the families of members who had died.

In the mean time his first wife, missing her accustomed letters, had set on foot a laborious investigation with the aid of a lawyer, had unearthed all his conduct, and was now suing to recover, as his only lawful wife, the benefit already paid to the second wife.

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AT DRINKWORTH'S.

tation in the Banner' office of being a firstclass crank, desirous of the notoriety that such creatures usually achieve in the way of getting their names in print. Longworth was an aggravation of Tax Payer,' the evil quintessence of Citizen,' Fair-Play,' and 'Veritas.' He thought he knew more than everybody else, and exhibited his ignorance and presumption with a lavishness of pen, ink, and paper that might have bankrupted a stationer.

6

"The trial of this case," so the article concluded, "will be one of the most famous in local annals, and the facts unfold to us one of those romances of villainy in real life that fiction and the stage so often feebly attempt to portray."

It is needless to say that the proof-slips of Mr. Forrest's three-column story were discussed that night before the paper went to press with an interest not often betrayed towards the most startling episodes that come within the practical province of newspaper work. Displaying in heroic measure his affectation of indifference, Mr. Forrest had turned in his copy and immediately gone home, and his absence left the remainder of the force freer to discuss the VOL. XXXVIII.—116..

worth. This view of it came out little by little, and was shared by all except the religious editor. That young gentleman, now in the height of a career of dissipation and pleasure which seemed to steel his heart against sympathy, was relentless.

"Serves him right," said he; "and Forrest can't hit him too hard to suit me. I always thought Longworth was too fond of little unnecessary facts to be any good. People of that kind," continued the religious editor, breezily generalizing," are mostly no good. A man can be so confounded accurate, you know, that he won't have time to be anything else. I like facts about as well as anybody else, but I don't go around proving that everybody else is a liar because he does n't happen to agree with me. That was about Longworth's size. He was so busy trying to keep other people from straying that he did n't have time to keep from becoming an infernal rascal himself."

But this extreme view found not a single echo. In fact, all recognized that Longworth had been more or less a mentor and a benefit to the staff, and there was no resentment harbored against his memory.

The fact that he had married two, or even more, wives did not influence us against him. In newspaper offices, among the men who make up the chronicle of daily history, the moral sense is not necessarily lost, but it is often not aroused by the discovery of wrong-doing. Tireless and inquisitive reporters see so many men doing wrong with impunity and know that so often punishment is a matter of accident or of interested malice, that they give a great deal of weight to the eleventh commandment, against being found out, and become unresponsive to personal morality in others as a moving sentiment to repel or attract. Longworth had been found out, but not until he was beyond punishment, and we bore him no malice on that score. That his crime gave us a good "story' " rather told in his favor, and as to his notes and his corrections, there was no denying he had always been right.

"Oh, I'd let it go in that way," said Mr. Burke, from the desk in his corner, illuminated by prints of race-horses and portraits of prizefighters, where he used to receive all sorts of hard-looking persons in pea-jackets, variously ornamented with ponderous jewelry. "Longworth is dead; he won't care, and both his wives will like to see him roasted. That part about his letters to the paper is very good, I think. It will teach a lot of other ducks of the kind who think they know it all that there are fellows in the office quietly keeping tab on them."

And so adopting this view of it, as, on the whole, journalistically sufficient, at two o'clock in the morning we buried in three columns of the first page all mortal that had been discovered of Longworth. He had been of us for seven or eight years, but it was only above his grave, and standing, as it were, over the wreck of his character and his good name, that we knew him at all. As we walked out of the great building in the early morning, the moon, bright and cloudless, sailing through the sky and marking shadows black and broad along the sidewalk, the burdened and groaning press was busily multiplying the humiliation of one who in his time had humiliated the active spirit of that very engine's existence. The most startling manifestations of human nature, the most unexpected disappointments of life, do not burden the mind or engage the emotions of the journalist. Wrecks of character, of life, and of hope are, for his professional attention, only just what the most dangerous wounds or most perilous diseases are to engage the trained attention of surgeon or physician. The one soon becomes accustomed to seeing all the sorrow and shame of life pass before him in sad review, as the other listens to the moan of pain or watches the unconscious

throes of the sick. And as each detaches himself from his personal feelings deftly to use the scalpel of his profession upon the abstract subject before him, he devotes no emotion to the effort and rapidly recoups himself for the next "case."

So it was with Longworth's story. Next day the highest feeling left in the bosoms of the "Democratic Banner" staff was that it was a splendid and unqualified "scoop." In our loathsome contemporary appeared not a line of the singular romance the three fascinating columns of which made the "Democratic Banner" a thing of beauty to the trained journalistic eye.

Even the business manager, a person usually of no journalistic instinct, and useful about newspaper offices only to pay editorial salaries, smiled that morning and was moved to approving comment upon the excellence of the exclusive story.

The city editor went to his desk therefore with buoyant spirit. Only, however, to have even his experienced and well-directed ardor dampened by the most unexpected of reactions contained in this note:

To THE EDITOR OF THE "Democratic Banner."

Will you kindly state in your issue of to-morrow that the Robert Longworth whose villainies are so ing's paper is not the Robert Longworth who has vividly and entertainingly described in this mornresided in the thriving suburb of Milltown for so many years? I ask this in justice to myself, because I infer that your reporter has made the error of confounding two Longworths. I have written a great many contributions for the "Democratic Banner," and may have laid myself open to the reflections in which he indulges about them; but I have not been blown and have no desire to be burdened with any other up on the Evening Star, or on any other boat, Longworth's shortcomings in addition to those your reporter has so vigorously pointed out as perhaps properly belonging to me.

Robert Longworth.

The note was written in the unmistakable feeble, quavering handwriting of Robert Longworth himself- the Robert Longworth who, but the night before, had been dismissed with so much of genuine compassionate feeling. That note seemed like his ghost suddenly returned from its mysterious bourn.

"Who left this note ?" the city editor inquired of the office-boy.

"An old man laid it on your desk and walked out," answered the boy.

Did he seem angry-did he say anything?" pursued the city editor.

"He never showed no signs," answered the astute youth, "of being hot in the collar. He just says, 'Give that to the editor,' and walked out whenst he come."

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