“IS this the office of the National Pop-gun and Universal Valve Trumpet?” inquired Sapid in sepulchral tones.

“Hey—what? Oh!—yes,” gruffly replied the clerk, as he scrutinised the applicant.

“It is, is it?” was the response.

“H—umpse;” heaving a porcine affirmative, much in use in the city of brotherly love.

“I am here to see the editor, on business of importance,” slowly and solemnly articulated Sapid. There must have been something professionally alarming in this announcement, if an opinion may be formed from the effect it produced.

“Editor’s not come down yet, is he, Spry?” inquired the clerk, with a cautionary wink at the paste-boy.

“Guess he ain’t more nor up yet,” said Spry; “the mails was late last night.”

“I’ll take a seat till he does come,” observed Sapid, gloomily.

Spry and the clerk laid their heads together in the most distant corner of the little office.

“Has he got a stick?” whispered one.

“No, and he isn’t remarkable big, nuther.”

“Any bit of paper in his hand—does he look like State House and a libel suit? It’s a’most time—not had a new suit for a week.”

“Not much; and, as we didn’t have any scrouger in the Gun yesterday, perhaps he wants to have somebody tickled up himself. Send him in.”

St. Sebastian Sockdolager, Esq., the editor of The National Pop-gun and Universal Valve Trumpet, sat at a green table, elucidating an idea by the aid of a steel pen and whity-brown paper, and therefore St. Sebastian Sockdolager did not look up when Mr. Sapid entered the sanctum. The abstraction may, perhaps, have been a sample of literary stage effect; but it is certain that the pen pursued the idea with the speed and directness of a steeple-chase, straight across the paper, and direful was the scratching thereof. The luckless idea being at last fairly run down and its brush cut off, Mr. Sockdolager threw himself back into his chair with a smile of triumph.

“Tickletoby,” said he, rumpling his hair into heroic expansiveness.

“What?” exclaimed Sapid, rather nervously.

“My dear sir, I didn’t see you—a thousand pardons! Pray what can be done for you in our line?”

“Sir, there is a nuisance——”

“Glad of it, sir; The Gun is death on a nuisance. We circulate ten thousand deaths to any sort of a nuisance every day, besides the weekly and the country edition. We are a regular smash-pipes in that line—surgical, surgical to this community—we are at once the knife and the sarsaparilla to human ills, whether financial, political, or social.”

“Sir, the nuisance I complain of lies in the circulation—in its mode and manner.”

“Bless me,” said Sockdolager, with a look of suspicion, “you are too literal in your interpretations. If your circulation is deranged, you had better try Brandreth, or the Fluid Extract of Quizembob.”

“It is not my circulation, but yours, that makes all the trouble. I never circulate—I can’t without being insulted.”

“Really, mister, I can’t say that this is clearly comprehensible to perception. Not circulate! Are you below par in the money article; or in what particular do you find yourself in the condition of ‘no go’? Excuse my facetiÆ and be brief, for thought comes tumbling, bumping, booming——” and Sockdolager dipped his pen in the ink.

Mr. Sappington Sapid unravelled the web of his miseries. “I wish you, sir, to control your newsboys—to dismiss the saucy, and to write an article which shall make ’em ashamed of themselves. I shall call on every editor in the city, sir, and ask the same—a combined expression for the suppression of iniquity. We must be emancipated from this new and growing evil, or our liberties become a farce, and we are squashed and crushed in a way worse than fifty tea-taxes.”

“Pardon me, Mr. Whatcheecallem; it can’t be done—it would be suicidal, with the sharpest kind of a knife. Whatcheecallem, you don’t understand the grand movement of the nineteenth century—you are not up to snuff as to the vital principle of human progression—the propulsive force has not yet been demonstrated to your benighted optics. The sun is up, sir; the hill-tops of intellect glow with its brightness, and even the level plain of the world’s collective mediocrity is gilded by its beams; but you, sir, are yet in the foggy valley of exploded prejudice, poking along with a tuppenny-ha’penny candle—a mere dip. Suppress sauciness! why, my dear bungletonian, sauciness is the discovery of the age—the secret of advancement! We are saucy now, sir, not by the accident of constitution—temperament has nothing to do with it. We are saucy by calculation, by intention, by design. It is cultivated, like our whiskers, as a superadded energy to our other gifts. Without sauciness, what is a newsboy? what is an editor? what are revolutions? what are people? Sauce is power. Sauce is spirit, independence, victory, everything. It is, in fact,—this sauce, or ‘sass,’ as the vulgar have it,—steam to the great locomotive of affairs. Suppress, indeed! No, sir; you should regard it as part of your duty as a philanthropist and as a patriot to encourage this essence of superiority in all your countrymen; and I’ve a great mind to write you an article on that subject instead of the other, for this conversation has warmed up my ideas so completely that justice will not be done to the community till they, like you, are enlightened on this important point.”

St. Sebastian Sockdolager, now having a leading article for The National Pop-gun and Universal Valve Trumpet clearly in his mind, was not a creature to be trifled with. An editor in this paroxysm, however gentle in his less inspired moments, cannot safely be crossed, or even spoken to. It is not wise to call him to dinner, except through the keyhole; and to ask for “more copy,” in general a privileged demand, is a risk too fearful to be encountered. St. Sebastian’s eye became fixed, his brow corrugated, his mouth intellectually ajar.

“But, sir, the nuisance,” said Sappington.

“Don’t bother!” was the impatient reply, and the brow of St. Sebastian Sockdolager grew black as his own ink.

“The boys, sir, the boys!—am I to be worried out of my life and soul?”

The right hand of St. Sebastian Sockdolager fell heavily upon the huge pewter inkstand—the concatenation of his ideas had been broken—he half raised himself from his chair and glanced significantly from his visitor to the door. “Mizzle!” said he, in a hoarse, suppressed whisper.

The language itself was unintelligible—the word might have been Chaldaic, for all that Sapid knew to the contrary; but there are situations in which an interpreter is not needed, and this appeared to be one of them. Sapid never before made a movement so swiftly extemporaneous.

He intends shortly to try whether the Grand Jury is a convert to the new doctrine of sauciness.