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

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

maid, charged with the duty of keeping the glasses full,
had evidently gained her professional education in a
different sphere. She was leaning jauntily over the
shoulder of an astonished prelate, and as she extended the
champagne-bottle was genially remarking, "Say when,
Bishop!"
The third picture brought home to his wife's dressingtable late at night a disordered gentleman who had wined
not wisely but too well. He had picked up a silvermounted hairbrush, mistaking it for the hand-mirror. He
was peering anxiously into the bristly side to ascertain
the state of his physiognomy, and was exclaiming with
astonishment: "Gosh! but I do need a shave."
This is only to illustrate the imagination that creates
incongruities that gratify the appetite for the ludicrous.
Such imagination is as real in its way, and as desirable
in its place and time, as the imagination building loftily
and beautifully in the territory of aesthetics. The best
newspaper men, so far as my observations go, have been
those whose own sense of humor was comprehensive
enough to perceive without sniffing this homely truth.
When the reform mayor of New
S' L York, the Honorable William L.
Strong, was setting a good example
to local politicians, and incidentally
exciting decorously suppressed delight
I in the bosom of his private secretary,
the Honorable Job E. Hedges, by
'P. serving Ceylon tea instead of the more
S'A familiar beverages at his five o'clocks
i in the City Hall, what comment
_"l could have been more suggestive of

the mayor's excellent intentions than
this little sketch by a Sun artist of the first and original
Tea Pot Dome?
My cross-section brings together strange company: