Young D. Webster Is Office Cut-Up

1916

NEEDS A SELF-ACTING BRAKE, EDITOR SAYS.

Lad All Right in a Way, but His Journalistic Rise Is Too Swift.

(From the Brownville Bugle.)

Daniel Webster Suggs, our new office boy, is developing fast. We picked him for a winner the first time we clapped eyes on him, but, at the same time, we are convinced that some effective means must be employed to hold him back, or else he'll soon consider himself as the Bugle's publisher, managing editor, mechanical superintendent and general manager at-large. The lad is all right, but needs some kind of a self-acting brake.

Bill and Maria Suggs certainly knew what they were about when they named their first-born after the great and illustrious D. Webster. This 13-year-old offspring of their's bids fair, in all due time, to implant the proud name of Suggs high on the emblazoned wall of fame, if in the meantime it is not enrolled among the names of those who are held behind more substantial walls. But we are digressing.

It was about three o'clock yesterday afternoon when the effulgent Daniel broke thru the customary privacy of our sanctum sanctorum and with bulging eyes asked us if we had missed the last ornithorhynchus. There had been two or three of these ornithorhynchuses asking for us, he said, but the last ornithorhynchus was the fiercest of the bunch, he informed us, and he then dropped a hint that perhaps it was just as well for us that we didn't meet the last ornithorhynchus that called.

Now, while it was true that we wouldn't have recognized a genuine ornithorhynchus if we saw it approaching all lit up, still, we decided it was not good managerial policy to let our youthful and unsalted Webster get wise to the fact, as it is the rankest sort of a mistake for a recognized journalist to put his "don't know" stamp on any kind of a problematical question presented by his intellectual inferiors. Better to get by with "weasel" words.

We admit, however, that this ornithorhynchus business was something we couldn't shake off. Then, at half-past five, as we were closing up the Bugle plant, this remarkable Websterian youth again put us up in the air by telling us there was a lot of ornithorhynchuses chasing after his father, and his father might have to jump town to shake them off. "Dad's fooled them afore by doing that," he said, "but, of course," he went on, "guys like you can't do anything like that, 'cause you got a business. Dad says it's a wise guy that keeps his business in a trunk, like the actors and actorines does. The ornithorhynchus never can put it over the actor people, 'cause they allus see 'em first, clap their props in the trunk and beat it down the back stairs. Some ornithorhynchuses You can see a mile off, 'cause some are yellow, and some are green, and once I saw a red one."

After the lad had gone we made up our mind we would solve the mystery of the ornithorhynchus if it took until midnight. Finally our nigh eye happened to light on the big dictionary — probably attracted that way by the name of Webster on the cover — and we lost no time in finding out if there was any such word as ornithorhynchus in it.

There was. Plain as day and as long as a piece of string. Just like this:

ORNITHORHYNCHUS — Beast with a bill.

There you have it. O-r-n-i-t-h-o-r-h-y-n-c-h-u-s — pests that come around after money when they ought to know you haven't got any.

—The Saturday Blade, Sept. 16, 1916, p. 10.