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SCISSORS AND PASTE.

LET us take a peep into a daily newspaper office, and see the Sub busy at his labours. The room is dingy and small; not overwell lit from without; and very badly ventilated. It is night-for midnight is the noon of the daily paper office-and half-a-dozen gas-lights flare up under green shades, heating the atmosphere so as to render it almost insupportable. In the centre of the room is a great desk or table, the principal objects distinguishable amid the litter of newspapers and MSS. that cover it, being a dirty old blotting-pad, and an inkstand the size of a tolerable punch-bowl. the side of the sub-editor's chair is an enormous waste-paper basket, which is full to the brim, the floor all around it being covered with letters, proofs, papers, and other rubbish which have escaped from the 'Balaam-box' of the establishment. Hard by the inkstand, but hidden just now by an open copy of the 'Times,' is a paste-pot which a bill-sticker need not be ashamed of owning;

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whilst the gentleman who sits at the desk, and who is just now looking over a provincial newspaper, holds in his hands a huge pair of scissors !

How shall I describe the accessories of the scene? They differ in every newspaper office in the kingdom, and yet a family-likeness may be detected in every such place. There are the smaller desks at which the sub-editor's assistants sit, and which are never more tidy than that of the ruler of this little kingdom. There is the greasy date-box, on the chimney-piece, the dingy old maps hung against the wall, the clumsy volumes of the 'file' piled in hopeless confusion in the rack, the little bookcase, stuffed with works of reference-Dictionaries, Peerages, Encyclopædias-the labyrinth of speaking tubes gathered on all sides of the sub-editor's seat, and the huge heaps of old newspapers, over which the unwary visitor stumbles. This, far more than the room of the chief-leader writer or of any other member of the staff, is the real heart and centre of the great machine whose influence is felt all over England; and the man who labours here is he who approaches most nearly to the popular ideal of a newspaper editor. It is into his hands that the epistles of 'Paterfamilias,' 'An Indignant Traveller,' A Volunteer,' 'A Constant Subscriber to your Valuable Journal,' and

the other variously-named writers who look to the press for the redress of their grievances, fall; he it is who knows the night before what the paper of the next morning is going to contain; who decides whether the 'copy' which poor Flimsy, the penny-a-liner, has dropped into the box with fear and trembling an hour before, shall be accepted and paid for, or flung carelessly into the wastebasket; who writes the short stinging notes at the end of letters of disagreeable or wearisome correspondents, which are invariably signed 'Ed.,' as though they alone, of all the original matter in the paper, had come from the hands of the editor; who compiles the readable summary of the day's news, whereby in five minutes you may make yourself acquainted with all the more important contents of the paper; and under whose direction the whole of that vast array of close reading, the law reports, accounts of meetings, accidents, ceremonies, and races, letters from foreign correspondents, and miscellaneous items of information which make up the bulk of every modern newspaper, are gathered together, condensed, digested, and arranged in the convenient form. in which they are subsequently presented to the public.

As he sits before us now, we may learn not a little regarding the manner in which he performs his duties by merely watching him. Here, for

instance, comes in a smartly-dressed porter, who produces, from a despatch-box the size of a small clothes-basket, a dozen newspapers and as many 'newspaper-parcels' that is to say, letters containing copy for the paper, which have been forwarded, for greater despatch, by rail instead of by post. The newspapers the sub-editor divides between his two assistants, one of whom takes all those from abroad, whilst the other takes those from the provinces; and whilst these gentlemen are dexterously using their scissors to disembowel the unfortunate prints, their chief makes a dash at the heap of parcels-uttering something between a groan and a curse at their number as he does so. The first gives him no trouble however. It has come from abroad, and consists of a long letter, written in the most microscopic of hands upon the thinnest of paper. Space has been kept for it-for is it not the letter of their Special Commissioner to the Great Fair at Nijni-Novgorod, and will it not be the leading feature of to-morrow's 'Monitor?' So this production is at once bundled into the tin in which the 'copy ready to go out,' as it is technically termed that is, copy ready for the hands of the compositors-is kept. But the other eleven parcels are not so easily disposed of. Two or three of them are market reports, and need but little alteration. The price of corn at Norwich, of iron at Wolver

hampton, of cotton at Manchester, are all given in these brief despatches; and however uninteresting they may be to the general public, there would be no small outcry amongst certain classes of the community if they failed to appear to-morrow morning.

But these disposed of, the sub-editor's difficulties begin. He opens one envelope, and takes out of it an enormous batch of thin tissue-paper-familiarly known as flimsy—all of which is devoted to the history of a horrible murder which has been committed that very day at Nottingham. He opens the next envelope, and here is another account of the same tragedy, furnished by a rival 'liner.' Our sub is a bold man, but he shrinks from the task of putting either of these voluminous narratives into a concise and readable shape. Both his assistants are fully occupied, however, and he has no alternative but to attempt the task. So he selects one of the reports, and by the aid of his scissors and a red pencil, he reduces it to about one-tenth of its original length-a work which occupies him nearly a quarter of an hour-and having done this, he adds the sub-edited report to the heap of copy ready for the printer. .

It would no doubt amuse my readers if I were to publish the narrative as forwarded by the pennya-liner with the narrative as it appeared in the

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