We wrote a conventional report of the performance, and printed Mehronay's account below it, under the caption FROM ANOTHER REPORTER, and it made the paper talked about for a week. Now in our town Keene was a histrionic god of the first order, and so many church people came to the office to "stop the paper" that circulation had a real impetus. We have never had a boom in subscription that did not begin with a lot of angry citizens coming in to stop the paper. It became known about town who wrote the Keene article, and Mehronay became in a small way a public character. We encouraged him to write more, so every morning the first proof slips that came in began to have on them ten or a dozen short items of Mehronay's writing. There was a smile in every one of them, and if he wrote more than ten lines there was a laugh. It was Mehronay who referred to Huddleson's livery-stable joint--where the old soaks got their beer in a stall and salted it from the feed-box--as "a gilded palace of sin." It was Mehronay who wrote the advertisement of the Chinese laundryman and signed his name "Fat Sam Child of the Sun, Brother of the Moon and Second Cousin by marriage to all the Stars." It was Mehronay who took a galley of pi which the office devil had set up from a wrecked form, and interspersed up and down the column of meaningless letters "Great applause"--"Tremendous cheering"--Cries of "Good, good!--that's the way to hit 'em!"--"Hurrah for Hancock"--and ran it in the paper as a report of Carl Schurz's speech to the German-American League at the court-house. It was Mehronay who put the advertisement in the paper proclaiming the fact that General Durham of the _Statesman_ office desired to purchase a good second-hand fiddle, and explaining that the owner must play five tunes on it in front of the _Statesman_ office door before bringing it in. Mehronay originated the fiction that there was an association in town formed to insure its members against wedding invitations which, in case of loss, paid the afflicted member a pickle dish or a napkin ring, to present as his offering to the bride.