Very often we read a man's work and imagine we shall find him like it,
cheery, bright and entertaining; but we know him and find that personally
he is a refrigerator, or an egotist, or a man with a torpid liver and a
nose like a rose geranium. You will not be disappointed in Bob Burdette,
however, You think you will like him, and you always do. He will never be
too famous to be a gentleman.
George W. Peck's hand is of the free and independent order of chirography.
It is easy and natural, but not handsome. He writes very voluminously,
doing his editorial writing in two days of the week, generally Friday and
Saturday. Then he takes a rapid horse, a zealous bird dog and an improved
double barrel duck destroyer and communes with nature.
Sam Davis, an old time Californian, and now in Nevada, writes the freest
of any penman I know. When he is deliberate, he may be betrayed into
making a deformed letter and a crooked mark attached to it, which he
characterizes as a word. He puts a lot of these together and actually pays
postage on the collection under the delusion that it is a letter, that it
will reach its destination, and that it will accomplish its object.
He makes up for his bad writing, however, by being an unpublished volume
of old time anecdotes and funny experiences.
Goodwin, of the old _Territorial Enterprise_, and Mark Twain's old
employer, writes with a pencil in a methodical manner and very plainly.
The way he sharpens a “hard medium” lead pencil and skins the apostle of
the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, makes my heart
glad. Hardly a day passes that his life is not threatened by the low
browed thumpers of Mormondom, and yet the old war horse raises the
standard of monogamy and under the motto, “One country, one flag and one
wife at a time,” he smokes his old meerschaum pipe and writes a column of
razor blades every day. He is the buzz saw upon which polygamy has tried
to sit. Fighting these rotten institutions hand to hand and fighting a
religious eccentricity through an annual message, or a feeble act of
congress, are two separate and distinct things.
If I had a little more confidence in my longevity than I now have, I would
go down there to the Valley of the Jordan, and I would gird up my loins,
and I would write with that lonely warrior at Salt Lake, and with the aid
and encouragement of our brethren of the press who do not favor the right
of one man to marry an old woman's home, we would rotten egg the bogus
Temple of Zion till the civilized world, with a patent clothes pin on its
nose, would come and see what was the matter.
I see that my zeal has led me away from my original subject, but I haven't
time to regret it now.
The Wild Cow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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