I "guessed" I _was_ "on;" and, went up-stairs to the paste-and-scissors purlieus with much gusto. It was a very good commencement for me--I who had nothing to bless myself with before, for, the salary would pay my board and lodging twice over. It was a beginning, at any rate; and, as we subsequently did "suit each other," my down-east friend behaved very fairly, keeping to his promise of "raising my pile"--a synonym for increasing the weekly sum of "greenbacks" he allowed me for my labours. I had never any reason to repent the bargain--nor did I. The work I had to do was by no means arduous, although, in many respects, of a novel character. From the fact that my residence in America had not been yet sufficiently extended to enable me to master the ins and outs of Transatlantic politics, the leading articles--or "editorials" as they are there styled--which I had to write were but few in number, and entirely referring to social subjects of local interest; notwithstanding that I was occasionally allowed to enlighten the Manhattan mind in the matter of European affairs. If my special "editor's" duties were thus light, I made up, however, for their deficiency, by enlarging upon the skeleton telegrams that came every night across the ocean--"expanding news," so to speak--and by also writing, on the arrival of every steamer, while seated in the back parlour of the journal's office in New York, the most graphic special correspondent's letters from Paris and London! With regard to the telegrams. Half a dozen words only might come over the cable, to say, for instance, that the late Emperor Napoleon, who was the then supposed arbiter of the Old World, had nominated Count somebody or General that to a fresh portfolio; or that, the "scion of the house of Hapsburgh" was suffering from tooth-ache; or that, John Bright was going to Dublin to lecture "on Irish affairs." My duties were such, that, when these telegrams appeared, in all the glories of print, the next morning, they had grown in such a miraculous way, that they took up half a yard of room, instead of but a few lines of type. Had you read them, you would have found their contents thoroughly explanatory, entering into the most minute details--as to how Napoleon's change of ministers would affect "the situation;" how poor Francis Joseph's attack of caries might, could and would raise again the ghost of "the Eastern question;" how the advent of the great Radical leader in Ireland would be the signal for a general Fenian uprising-- and, so on. I _only_ mention these cases in point, to describe the way in which I clothed my skeletons with solid substrata of flesh and blood. The public, you see, had only so much the more information for their money-- which was, probably, just as reliable as if it had been really "wired" under the Atlantic! Nobody was the wiser; nobody, the sufferer by the deception; so, what was "the odds" so long as they were correspondingly "happy"--in their ignorance?