THE EDITOR OF THE PATRIOT.

The editor of the village paper, The Patriot and Advertiser, is Major Slott; and a very clever journalist he is.  Even his bitterest adversary, the editor of The Evening Mail, in the town above us on the river, admits that.  In the last political campaign, indeed, The Mail undertook to tell how it was that the major acquired such a taste for journalism.  The story was that shortly after he was born the doctor ordered that the baby should be fed upon goat’s milk.  This was procured from a goat that was owned by an Irish woman who lived in the rear of the office of The Weekly Startler and fed her goat chiefly upon the exchanges which came to that journal.  The consequence, according to The Mail, was that young Slott was fed entirely upon milk formed from digested newspapers; and he throve on it, although when the Irish woman mixed the Democratic journals carelessly with the Whig papers they disagreed after they were eaten, and the milk gave the baby colic.  Old Slott intended the boy to be a minister; but as soon as he was old enough to take notice he cried for every newspaper that he happened to see, and no sooner did he learn how to write than he began to slash off editorials upon “The Need of Reform,” etc.  He ran away from school four times to enter a newspaper office, and finally, when the paternal Slott put him in the House of Refuge, he started a weekly in there, and called it the House of Refuge Record; and one day he slid over the wall and went down to the Era office, where he changed his name to Blott, and began his career on that paper with an article on “Our Reformatory Institutions for the Young.”  Then old Slott surrendered to what seemed to be a combination of manifest destiny and goat’s milk, and permitted him to pursue his profession.  The major, The Mail alleges, has the instinct so strong that if he should fall into the crater of Vesuvius his first thought on striking bottom would be to write to somebody to ask for a free pass to come out with.  “But,” continued The Mail, “you would hardly believe this story if you ever read The Patriot.  We often suspect, when we are looking over that sheet, that the nurse used to mix the goat’s milk with an unfair proportion of water.”

The major has a weekly edition in which he publishes serial stories of a stirring character, and he is always looking out for good ones.  Recently a tale was submitted by a certain Mr. Stack, a young man who had high ambition without much experience as a writer of fiction.  After waiting a long while and hearing nothing about the story, Mr. Stack concluded to call upon the major in order to ascertain why that narrative had not attracted attention.  When Stack mentioned his errand, the major reached for the manuscript; and looking very solemn, he said,