"We have received two late numbers of the _CALIFORNIAN_, a dim, dirty little paper printed in Monterey on the worn-out materials of one of the old California _WAR PRESSES_. It is published and edited by Walter Colton and Robert Semple, the one a _WHINING SYCOPHANT_, and the other an _OVER-GROWN LICK-SPITTLE_. At the top of one of the papers we find the words 'please exchange.' This would be considered in almost any other country a bare-faced attempt to swindle us. We should consider it so now were it not for the peculiar situation of our country which induces us to do a great deal for others in order for them to do us a little good.... We have concluded to give our paper to them this year, so as to afford them some insight into the manner in which a Republican newspaper should be conducted. They appear now to be awfully verdant." Down through the seventies and eighties the tradition persisted, newspapers being bought and read, as a historian of journalism asserts, not so much for news as to see who was getting "lambasted" that day. It is not strange, then, that journals of redoubtable pugnacity were popular, or that editors favored writers who were likely to excel in the gladiatorial style. It is significant that public praise first came to Bierce through his articles in the caustic _NEWS LETTER_, widely read on the Pacific Coast during the seventies. Once launched in this line, he became locally famous for his fierce and witty articles in the _ARGONAUNT_ and the _WASP_, and for many years his column _Prattle_ in the _EXAMINER_ was, in the words of Mr. Bailey Millard, "the most wickedly clever, the most audaciously personal, and the most eagerly devoured column of _causerie_ that ever was printed in this country." In 1896 Bierce was sent to Washington to fight, through the Hearst newspapers, the "refunding bill" which Collis P. Huntington was trying to get passed, releasing his Central Pacific Railroad from its obligations to the government. A year later he went again to Washington, where he remained during the rest of his journalistic career, as correspondent for the New York _AMERICAN_, conducting also for some years a department in the _COSMOPOLITAN_.