Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

THE DOOR TO THE COMPOSING-ROOM

95

then star correspondent and editorial writer on that
paper. Boyle O'Reilly took up the idea with characteristic
enthusiasm and wrote for the Christmas number a poem
called "The Dukite Snake." It has a place, I think, in
his collected writings. It tells of terrible ophidians in the
Australian bush, long red snakes always travelling in
pairs; and when one of the pair is destroyed the other
Will follow your trail like Death or Fate
And kill you as sure as you killed its mate.
This Kiplingesque fancy-but Kipling was then hardly
six years old-was wrought into a very tragic story.
King found it admirable, although perhaps deficient in
the plum-pudding and mistletoe spirit of Yuletide. The
author assured us that he had seen dukites and observed
their habits; that a dukite would pursue Santa Claus himself to the death if its mate's flat head should be smashed
by one of the reindeer's hoofs. The moral, he declared,
was that we must all be kind to animals; and that was
good for Christmas.
"The Dukite Snake" therefore got into the famous
Christmas number, together with a thrilling story of the
siege of Paris by Ed King, a most humorous theatrical
narrative by Hurd of the Transcript, a novelette of aristocratic society entitled "A Rival to the Rescue," by
Hilary Skinner, who is faintly recalled as a visiting British journalist and a friend of King's, and a jejune tale
called "Tarbucket," which the author has not now the
courage to investigate. "Afloat in Bohemia" was the
title under which we jointly surprised Boston on Christmas morning of 1871, filling thirty-two broad columns,

each twenty-four inches long, costing the proprietors not
one cent except for paper and ink. I wonder how many
there are who remember this innocent effort to oblige.
Edward King was an accomplished journalist of wide
experience for so young a man. He had made good prog