Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Europe -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Walking -- Fiction
The reading-matter is compressed into two hundred and five small-pica
lines, and is lighted up with eight pica headlines. The bill of fare
is as follows: First, under a pica headline, to enforce attention and
respect, is a four-line sermon urging mankind to remember that, although
they are pilgrims here below, they are yet heirs of heaven; and that
"When they depart from earth they soar to heaven." Perhaps a four-line
sermon in a Saturday paper is the sufficient German equivalent of the
eight or ten columns of sermons which the New-Yorkers get in their
Monday morning papers. The latest news (two days old) follows the
four-line sermon, under the pica headline "Telegrams"--these are
"telegraphed" with a pair of scissors out of the AUGSBURGER ZEITUNG of
the day before. These telegrams consist of fourteen and two-thirds lines
from Berlin, fifteen lines from Vienna, and two and five-eights lines
from Calcutta. Thirty-three small-pica lines of telegraphic news in a
daily journal in a King's Capital of one hundred and seventy thousand
inhabitants is surely not an overdose. Next we have the pica heading,
"News of the Day," under which the following facts are set forth: Prince
Leopold is going on a visit to Vienna, six lines; Prince Arnulph is
coming back from Russia, two lines; the Landtag will meet at ten o'clock
in the morning and consider an election law, three lines and one word
over; a city government item, five and one-half lines; prices of tickets
to the proposed grand Charity Ball, twenty-three lines--for this one
item occupies almost one-fourth of the entire first page; there is to be
a wonderful Wagner concert in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, with an orchestra
of one hundred and eight instruments, seven and one-half lines. That
concludes the first page. Eighty-five lines, altogether, on that page,
including three headlines. About fifty of those lines, as one perceives,
deal with local matters; so the reporters are not overworked.
Exactly one-half of the second page is occupied with an opera criticism,
fifty-three lines (three of them being headlines), and "Death Notices,"
ten lines.
The other half of the second page is made up of two paragraphs under
the head of "Miscellaneous News." One of these paragraphs tells about a
quarrel between the Czar of Russia and his eldest son, twenty-one and
a half lines; and the other tells about the atrocious destruction of a
peasant child by its parents, forty lines, or one-fifth of the total of
the reading-matter contained in the paper.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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