“At the end of the next three hours I had been
through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were gone
from me. Gillespie had called and thrown me out of the window. Jones arrived
promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took the job off my
hands. In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, I had lost my
scalp. Another stranger, by the name of Thompson, left me a mere wreck and ruin
of chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in the corner, and beset by an infuriated
mob of editors, blacklegs, politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore
and flourished their weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing
flashes of steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the
chief arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends. Then
ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one either,
could describe. People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up, thrown out of
the window. There was a brief tornado of murky blasphemy, with a confused and
frantic war-dance glimmering through it, and then all was over. In five minutes
there was silence, and the gory chief and I sat alone and surveyed the
sanguinary ruin that strewed the floor around us.
“He said, ‘You'll like this place when you get used
to it.’"—American novelist and humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910), “Journalism
in Tennessee,” in The Complete Short Stories (Everyman’s Library
Classic Series, 2012)
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