St. Sebastian Sockdolager, Esq., the editor of _The National Pop-gun and Universal Valve Trumpet_, sat at a green table, elucidating an idea by the aid of a steel pen and whity-brown paper, and therefore St. Sebastian Sockdolager did not look up when Mr. Sapid entered the sanctum. The abstraction may, perhaps, have been a sample of literary stage effect; but it is certain that the pen pursued the idea with the speed and directness of a steeple-chase, straight across the paper, and direful was the scratching thereof. The luckless idea being at last fairly run down and its brush cut off, Mr. Sockdolager threw himself back into his chair with a smile of triumph. “Tickletoby,” said he, rumpling his hair into heroic expansiveness. “What?” exclaimed Sapid, rather nervously. “My dear sir, I didn’t see you—a thousand pardons! Pray what can be done for you in our line?” “Sir, there is a nuisance——” “Glad of it, sir; _The Gun_ is death on a nuisance. We circulate ten thousand deaths to any sort of a nuisance every day, besides the weekly and the country edition. We are a regular smash-pipes in that line—surgical, surgical to this community—we are at once the knife and the sarsaparilla to human ills, whether financial, political, or social.” “Sir, the nuisance I complain of lies in the circulation—in its mode and manner.” “Bless me,” said Sockdolager, with a look of suspicion, “you are too literal in your interpretations. If your circulation is deranged, you had better try Brandreth, or the Fluid Extract of Quizembob.” “It is not my circulation, but yours, that makes all the trouble. I never circulate—I can’t without being insulted.” “Really, mister, I can’t say that this is clearly comprehensible to perception. Not circulate! Are you below par in the money article; or in what particular do you find yourself in the condition of ‘no go’? Excuse my facetiæ and be brief, for thought comes tumbling, bumping, booming——” and Sockdolager dipped his pen in the ink. Mr. Sappington Sapid unravelled the web of his miseries. “I wish you, sir, to control your newsboys—to dismiss the saucy, and to write an article which shall make ’em ashamed of themselves. I shall call on every editor in the city, sir, and ask the same—a combined expression for the suppression of iniquity. We must be emancipated from this new and growing evil, or our liberties become a farce, and we are squashed and crushed in a way worse than fifty tea-taxes.”