Page:Creole Sketches.djvu/26

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xxii
HEARN'S CARTOONS

former owner of the Item said: "Hearn did not write the 'Wayside Notes' — that was my column. But I'll tell you what he did write those verses illustrated with woodcuts. They were all Hearn's — his ideas, his verses, his drawings. He drew those cartoons — the first newspaper cartoons in this part of the country — and he cut them with his pen-knife on wood-blocks on the backs of old wooden types, which had been used for advertisements. They were just the right height, you see, to fit into the bed we used the old-fashioned flat-bed press, of course — and every day he would whittle out one of those drawings. Some of them were right interesting, too. You remember those about the old 'Magazine Market gang'? That was a gang of hoodlums that ruled all that part of the city, and the police were powerless. Hearn held them up to ridicule, in these cartoons —