THE RURAL PRESS
THERE will be joy in the household of the country editor what time the rural mind shall no longer crave the unwholesome stimuli provided by composing accounts of corpulent beetroots, bloated pumpkins, dropsical melons, aspiring maize, and precocious cabbages. Then the bucolic journalist shall have surcease of toil, and may go out upon the meads to frisk with kindred lambs, frolic familiarly with loose-jointed colts and exchange grave gambolings with solemn cows. Then shall the voice of the press, no longer attuned to praise of the vegetable kingdom, find a more humble but not less useful employment in calling the animal kingdom to the evening meal beneath the sanctum window.
To the overworked editor life will have a fresh zest, a new and quickening significance. The hills shall seem to hump more greenly up to a bluer sky, the fields to blush with a tenderer sunshine. He will go forth at dawn executing countless flip-flaps of gymnasticjoy; and when the white sun shall redden with the blood of dying day, and the pigs shall set up a fine evening hymn of supplication to the Giver of All Swill he will be jubilant in the editorial feet, blissfully conscious that the editorial intellect is a-ripening for the morrow’s work.
The rural newspaper! We sit with it in hand, running our fingers over the big, staring letters, as over the black and white keys of a piano, drumming out of them a mild melody of perfect repose. With what delight one disports him in the deep void of its nothingness, as who should swim in air! Here is nothing to startle, nothing to wound. The very atmosphere is suffused and saturated with “the spirit of the rural press;” and even one’s dog sits by, slowly dropping the lids over its great eyes; then lifting them with a jerk, tries to look as if it were not sleepy in the least degree. A fragrance of plowed fields comes to one like a benediction. The tinkle of ghostly cowbells falls drowsily upon the ear. Airy figures of prize esculents float before the half-shut eyes and vanish before perfect vision can attain to them. Above and about are the drone of bees and the muffled thunder of milk-streams shooting into thefoaming bucket. The gabble of distant geese is faintly marked off by the barking of a distant dog. The city, with all its noises, sinks away, as from one in a balloon, and our senses swim in the “intense inane” of country languor. We slumber.
God bless the man who invented the country newspaper!—though Sancho Panza blessed him long ago.