A yell followed his retreat, which would have shaken the nerves of a Coriolanus, but they steadied our hero's, and calm and composed he strode through the door leading from the dining room. The county editor seized the chicken and doughnuts, and hurled them after him, when John coolly closed the door, picked up the indignities, put them in his hat, and departed. Taking the road which led from the town, he turned his back upon the scene of the late festivities. As he again plodded onward he might be heard ejaculating--“Well, wasn't that a streak of fat! What a dinner! Fit for the gods, as I'm a gentleman! Rather funny at the winding up, but the commencement and the continuation was conducted with statesmanlike skill, and after all, the winding up was but an agreeable little interlude.” As John crept into a barn that night, some few miles from the town of M., and stretched himself upon the straw to sleep off the glories of the day, he quietly murmured to himself--“Well, here goes for another streak of lean!” CHAPTER III. John's Editorial Career. |In our hero's peregrinations he wandered into the Sucker state, the country of vast projected rail roads, good corndodger, splendid banking houses, and poor currency, and during his progress therein he earned and hoarded about one hundred and fifty bona fide dollars. With this store of wealth jingling in his pockets, he entered the town of B--------; he did not come now as the needy adventurer, but as one holding one hundred and fifty considerations entitling him to respect. The world had taken a wider spread to his eye, and assumed new features, or rather he began to see with a clearer vision, for the common order of society appeared now, as plain as daylight, to have most villainous faces, and the respectability of wealth was as apparent as moonshine--he could now easily assign a reason for the deference paid to high station--in short, he had arrived at a state of feeling highly becoming the possessor of increasing wealth. Addressing the innkeeper of the town, who was a member of one of the first families, with an air of consequence, he demanded a whole room for his accommodation, when heretofore the third chance in a bed would have been considered a luxury, oriental in its character, and a blessing befitting a “three tailed bashaw.” The little town was an important one, as all sucker towns are, yet the arrival of our hero was enough to create a sensation from its one extremity to the other. An acquaintance with the innkeeper soon gained him an introduction to the member of the legislature from that district, and this opening soon made him intimate with the town. Many efforts were made by the citizens to “draw him out,” and learn his business, but John kept dark. “He's a close fellar,” said a sucker citizen, “but I reckon, arter all, his business is pole-ticks.” These and sundry other “ambiguous givings out,” assured our hero that he was a subject of general interest.