The bureau had a Menu Page, too, made up by a very lean and hungry-looking old gentleman who lunched sparingly on a sandwich each noon, and a Religious Thought Page, edited by a very stout individual who kept a brandy-flask standing beside his ink-bottle. A profitable branch of its business was the preparation of obituaries of eminent men still living, and it is on record that one editor had made it his cheerful practise to submit these touching studies to the different gentlemen whom they most intimately concerned, naively asking if anything further remained to be said. What the bureau fattened on, however, was the uncopyrighted in general, and for all such morsels it watched with hawk-like intensity. An English novel or any less substantial publication which came to it unprotected by the arm of the law was pounced on at once, rapaciously and gleefully. It was renamed, abridged or expanded as the case might require, and in less time than it took the original author to indite his first chapter, it was on the market as a new and thrilling serial, "secured by special arrangement." The bureau, among other things, paid particular attention to the wants of the farmer, and issued a Dairy Page, edited by an elderly maiden lady who made Brooklyn her home and beheld a cow not more than once a year. The expert who edited the Agricultural Page, it might be added, had prepared himself for such tasks by many years' labor as an insurance agent. The bureau also boasted of a professional poet, who ran strongly to patriotism, but as his rhymes were manufactured for the convenience of the rather undiscriminating bucolic editor and later on for the delectation of the bucolic reader, his Gems in Verse usually went unchallenged. Since it took several days for the dissemination of the bureau's material, as everything went from its offices made up into plates and boxed for express, all of its offerings had to be prepared with a wholesome disregard as to dates. This somewhat handicapped the dramatic editor, who found it necessary to write bright and ingenious criticisms of plays without first witnessing their performance--although, it must be confessed, any difficulty on this score was usually obviated by making all notices unreservedly eulogistic--otherwise remote editors later on wrote in complaining of the loss of passes for those same performances when they ventured out on the road and joined hands with the bureau in that common and most commendable pursuit of stimulating the imagination of the masses.