“I suppose it is. I know that Dent--he is a New York city boy, who doesn’t know clover from cabbage--once put in a paragraph about the importance of feeding chickens on rock salt, and an old farmer from Boltus came in early one morning and whaled the bookkeeper out of his boots because he had followed the advice and killed all his hens. There must be some funny man out West somewhere who makes up these bad agricultural paragraphs, and of course they get copied. How can fellows like Dent, for instance, tell which are good and which are not? But they can’t fool you, and that’ll be an advantage. Then there’s Religious. You can do that easily enough. I should think.” “Yes,” interposed Murtagh, “all you have to do is to lay for the Obago _Evening Mercury_. Every Saturday that has a column of religious. Alec Watson, a fellow in that office, has fifty-two of these columns, extracts from Thomas à Kempis, and Wesley and Spurgeon and that sort of thing, which have been running in the _Mercury_ since before the war. When New Year’s comes he starts ’em going again, round and round. Nobody knows the difference. Well, their columns are longer than ours, so each week you can run about half their paragraphs--the shortest ones--and then fill in with some news notes, statistics, you know, about how many churches the Moravians have now, and that sort of thing. You can pick those up during the week, anywhere.” “Then there ought to be some originality about it too,” said Tom Watts. “It is just as well to sling in some items of your own, I think, such as ‘There is a growing desire among the Baptists to have Bishops, like other people,’ or, ‘It is understood that at the coming Consistory the Pope will create seven new American Cardinals.’ That last is a particularly good point. Every once in a while, predict more Cardinals. It doesn’t hurt anybody, and it makes you solid when the thing does happen. There’s nothing like original news to show the influence of journalism. One morning, after the cakes had been bad for a week, heavy, sour or something else, I said to my landlady that I believed the fault must be in the buckwheat. She said no, she didn’t think so, for the flour looked very nice indeed. I put a line in ‘Local Glimpses’ that day, saying that unfortunately the buckwheat this year was of inferior quality, and the very next morning she apologised to me: said I was right; the buckwheat _was_ bad; she had read so in the _Chronicle_. Can you imagine a nobler illustration of the power of the press?” Seth looked attentively at the speaker, to see if he was joking, but there was no more evidence of mirth in his thin face than in the serious tone of his voice. None of the others laughed.