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There were silent figures slipping about—Captain King, a chief editorial writer; Casper S. Yost, a secretary of the corporation, assistant editor and what not; several minor editors, artists, reporters, the city editor, the business manager—but no one or all of them collectively seemed to amount to a hill of beans. Only “the old man” or J. B., as he was occasionally referred to, counted. Under him the paper had character, succinctness and point, not only in its news but in its editorial columns. Although it was among the conventional of the conventional of its day (what American newspaper of that period could have been otherwise?), still it had an awareness which made one feel that “the old man” knew much more than he ever wrote. He seemed to like to have it referred to as “the great religious daily” and often quoted that phrase, but with the saving grace of humor behind it.

And he seemed to understand just how to supply that region with all it desired in the shape of news. Though in the main the paper published mere gossip, oddities about storms, accidents, eccentricities, still there was something about the way the thing was done, the crisp and brief manner in which the material was edited, which made it palatable—very much so, I should say, to the small-town store-lounger or owner—and nearly all had humor, naïveté or pathos. The drift of things politically was always presented in leaders in such a way that even I, a mere stripling, began to get a sense of things national and international. States, the adjacent ones in particular, which supplied the bulk of the Globe’s circulation, were given special attention and yet in such a way as not to irritate the general reader, leaving it optional with him whether he should read or not. The editorials, sometimes informing, sometimes threatening and directive, sometimes mere fol-de-rol and foolery, and intended as such, had a delicious whimsy in them. Occasionally “the old man” himself wrote one and then everybody sat up and took notice. One could easily single it out even if it had not been passed around, as it nearly always was. “The old man wrote that.” “Have you read the old man’s editorial in this morning’s paper? Gee! Read it!” Then you expected brilliant, biting words, a luminous phraseology, sentences that cracked like a whip, and you were rarely disappointed. The paragraphs exploded at times, burst like a torpedo; at others the whole thing ended like music, the deep, sonorous bass of an organ. “The old man” could write, there was no doubt of that. He also seemed to believe what he wrote, for the time being anyhow. That was why his staff, to a man, revered him. He was a real editor, as contrasted with your namby-pamby “business man” masquerading as editor. He had been a great reporter and war correspondent in his day, one of the men who were with Farragut on the Mississippi and with Sherman and others elsewhere during the great Civil War.