Counting in the three years he was in the army, he has been running the _Statesman_ for forty-five years, and for thirty-five years he was master of the field. For thirty years this town was known as General A. Jackson Durham's town. He ran the county Republican conventions, and controlled the five counties next to ours, so that, though he could never go to Congress himself, on account of his accumulation of enemies, he always named the successful candidate from the district, and for a generation held undisturbed the selection of post-masters within his sphere of influence. In State politics he was more powerful than any Congressman he ever made. Often he came down to the State Convention with blood in his eye after the political scalp of some politician who had displeased him, and the fight he made and the disturbance he started, gave him the name of Old Bull Durham. On such occasions, he would throw back his head, shut his eyes and roar his wrath at his opponents in a most disquieting manner, and when he returned home, whether he had won or lost his fight, his paper would bristle for two or three weeks with rage, and his editorial page would be full of lurid articles written in short exclamatory sentences, pocked with italics, capital letters and black-faced lines. [Illustration: He advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing callers at his office his barrel] For General A. Jackson Durham was a fire-eater and was proud of it. He advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing his barrel to callers at his office. In that barrel he had filed away every disreputable thing that he had been able to find against friend or foe, far or near, and when the friend became a foe, or the foe became troublesome, the General opened his barrel. He kept also an office blacklist, on which were written the names of the men in town that were never to be printed in the _Statesman_. When we established our little handbill of a newspaper, he made all manner of fun of our "dish-rag," as he called it, and insisted on writing so much about our paper that people read it to see what we had to say. Other papers had made the mistake of replying to the General in kind, and people had soon tired of the quarrel and dropped the new quarrelling paper for the old one. The State never had seen the General's equal as a wrangler; but we did not fight back, and there was only a one-sided quarrel for the people to tire of. We grew and got a foothold in the town, but the General never admitted it. He does not admit it now, though his paper has been cut down time and again, and is no larger than our little dish-rag was in the beginning. But he still maintains his old assumption of the power that departed years ago. He walked proudly out of the County Convention the day that it rode over him, and he still begins the names of the new party leaders in the county in small letters to show his contempt for them.