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COUNTRY NEWSPAPERS AND THEIR EDITORS.
BY FREDERIC CARRINGTON, ESQ.
I was standing in the counting-house of the Journal late one evening, just as the paper was going to press, when a young lady, a governess out of place, as it turned out, hurried in belated with an advertisement, and requested that it might be inserted in that week's paper. The clerk told her she had come too late; upon which she turned and addressed me, thinking probably that I was somebody in authority, and begged as a particular favour that I would get a place for her advertisement, as its immediate appearance she said, was of some consequence to her. I expressed my willingness to oblige a lady at all times when it was possible; but added, that in the present case it was impossible; and, in fact, as I spoke, the floor of the room above us shook with the movement of the printing-machine. The young lady had, however; either heard or seen something of the process of printing; for she evidently entertained a belief that her advertisement could be "put into a corner," notwithstanding my explanation that the form had been already "made up." Not many weeks before the occurrence of this incident, a huge farmer, even more- positive in his utter ignorance than the young lady was in her partial knowledge of printing, came into the counting-house, and wanted, a copy of the Journal some hours before it was ready for press. In vain he was told it was impossible. "Sure-ly," he said, "you can print just one for me?" And, unable to comprehend what he was told, that fifty could be printed almost as easily as one, when we were ready for printing one, he went away grumbling and growling about the unkindness with which he, an old subscriber, had been treated on the very last day he should be in England, in that we would not "gi' a body a peaper to teake the news wi' un to Austraylyia." Now compliance with the request of the young lady would have been something like stopping the express-train in mid-career to take up a solitary passenger; while that of the farmer was just as impossible as it would be to ripen one apple on a tree before the season had arrived for ripening the whole crop. Anybody, in fact, who knows anything about printing, knows that such requests are absurd; but as there are many people who cannot see the absurdity of them, I shall make their ignorance a reason for describing how a country newspaper is "got up."
I shall choose for my subject a journal published on Saturday morning, for that is the natural birthday of a country newspaper. Saturday, being at the end of the week, the paper contains the news of the week instead of the news of fragments of two weeks. Then it is the day that country people, coming to market, can carry back the news, while on Sunday almost everybody has leisure for reading. Yet this rule does not hold good in all cases. An indifferent day, in truth, is Saturday for Conservative papers, especially for those which bear a strict Church of England character, and go into parsonages and mansions; for in the one it is not considered right, and in the others, respectable, to read or perhaps even to receive, the newspapers on the Sabbath. But for the liberal journals, circulating amongst persons who are chained to the counter six days out
