It is on this congenial ground that I meet those juvenile friends to whom I introduced a large circle of acquaintances, even in the second hour of “Twice Round the Clock”—I mean the newspaper boys. In another page I said, jestingly, that I was afraid of boys. I must except from the category the newspaper boys. I have been sadly harassed and teazed by them in their out-of-door or bagful state, when they go round to purchase newspapers: for I once happened to be editor of a cheap journal, at whose office there was no editor’s room. I was compelled, occasionally, to read my proofs behind the counter, in the presence of the publisher and his assistant, and I have endured much mental pain and suffering from the somewhat too demonstrative _facetiæ_ of the young gentlemen engaged in the “trade.” Verbal satire of the most acutely personal nature was their ordinary mode of procedure; but, occasionally, when the publication (as sometimes happened) was late in its appearance, their playfulness was aggravated to the extent of casting an old shoe at me, and on one signal occasion a bag of flour. Still the newspaper boy is the twin-brother of the printer’s devil; and, much as I have seen of those patient, willing little urchins, I should be a brute if I were hard to them, here. The newspaper boys are, of course, in immense array at the six o’clock fair on Friday evening. They are varied, as currants are by sultanas in a dumpling, by newspaper men, who, where the boys struggle up to the window and drop in their load, boldly fling bags full, sacks full, of journals into the yawning casement. There is a legend that they once threw a boy into the window, newspapers and all. But at six o’clock everything is over—the window is closed—and newspaper fair is adjourned to the next Friday. SEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM, AND “BEHIND THE SCENES.”