Musing pleasantly on these things, he reached the newspaper building.

He climbed the stairs to his second-floor office somewhat furtively, for he did not want to meet Mr Shillito and exchange greetings with him. He was determined to do nothing which might appear two-faced, and Mr Shillito’s greetings were of so courtly and old-world a nature that he was often enticed into a geniality of which he was afterward ashamed. He must not feed the Old Mess sugar from his hand, while concealing the sword behind his back. But his path was clear, and he slipped into his office unseen by anyone but Miss Green, his secretary. She followed him through the door.

“No personal mail this morning, Mr Ridley. Just the usual. And the switchboard says somebody called you before nine, but wouldn’t leave their name.”

The usual was neatly marshalled on his desk. Miss Green had been solicitous about the morning’s letters since the day, more than three days ago, when somebody had sent him a dead rat, wrapped as a gift, with a card explaining that this was a comment upon The Bellman’s stand on a matter of public controversy. She had failed, since then, to intercept an envelope filled with used toilet paper (a political innuendo) but in general her monitorship was good. There were ten Letters to the Editor, and he took them up without curiosity, and with a thick black pencil ready in his hand.

Two, from “Fair Play” and “Indignant”, took the Salterton City Council to task, the former for failing to re-surface the street on which he lived, and the latter for proposing to pave a street on which he owned property, thereby raising the rates. Both writers had allowed anonymity to go to their heads, and both had added personal notes requesting that their true names be withheld, as they feared reprisals of an unspecified nature. From “Fair Play”s’ letter Ridley deleted several sentences, and changed the word “shabby” to “ill-advised”. “Indignant” required more time, as the writer had not used enough verbs to make his meaning clear, and had apparently punctuated his letter after writing it, on some generous but poorly conceived principle of his own.

The third letter was so badly written that even his accustomed eye could make very little of it, but it appeared to be from an aggrieved citizen whose neighbour spitefully threw garbage into his back yard. Other iniquities of the neighbour were rehearsed, but Ridley marked the letter for Miss Green’s attention; she would return it with the usual note declining to publish libellous material.

The next three letters were legible, grammatical and reasonable, and dealt with a scheme to create a traffic circle at a principal intersection of the city. They were quickly given headings and marked for the printer.

The seventh letter urged that a hockey coach who had trained some little boys the winter before be prevented, by force if necessary, from training them in the winter to come. He was, it appeared, a monster and a heretic whose influence would prove the ruin of hockey tactics and the downfall of that sport in Canada. It was signed with a bold signature and a street address, but the editor’s eye was not deceived. He consulted the Salterton City Directory and found, as he had suspected, that there was no such number as 183 Maple Street, and no such person as Arthur C. Brown. With a sigh for the duplicity of mankind, he threw the letter into the wastepaper basket. He was a little pleased, also, that the intuition which suggested to him that a signature was a fake was in good working order.

The eighth letter was from a farmer who charged the Salterton Exhibition Committee with great unfairness and some measure of dishonesty in the matter of awarding prizes in the Pullet sub-section of the Poultry Division of the Livestock Competition at the fall fair. He was aware, he said, that the fair had taken place seven weeks ago, but it had taken him a little time to get around to writing his letter. It went into the waste basket.

The ninth letter caused Ridley both surprise and annoyance. It read:

No error about that signature; old Bumford, at eighty-four, was reversing the usual tendency of old men to damn everything, and was loud in his praise of virtually everything. No reason not to publish it. Dead certainty that if it did not appear within a day or two old Bumford would be on the telephone, or worse still, in the chair opposite his desk, asking why. And yet it was out of the question that the thing should be published. Ridley laid it aside for later consideration.

The tenth letter was in a well-known hand, in green ink. Letters in that hand, and in that ink, appeared on Ridley’s desk every two weeks, and their message was always the same: the world had forgotten God. Sometimes it showed this forgetfulness by permitting children to read the comic strips; sometimes drink—invariably referred to as “beverage alcohol”—was the villain; sometimes it was the decline in church attendance which especially afflicted the writer; in winter the iniquity of ski-trains, which travelled during church hours and bore young people beyond the sound of church bells, was complained of; in summer it was the whoredom of two-piece bathing suits, and shorts which revealed girls’ legs, which was consuming society. The writer was able to support all her arguments by copious quotations from Holy Writ, and she did so; now and then she related a modern enormity to one of the monsters in Revelation. The letter at hand urged that the Prime Minister be advised to declare November 11th a National Day of Prayer, in which, by an act of mass repentance, Canada might be cleansed of her wrong-doings, and at the end of which her iniquity might be pardoned. The letter was marked “Urgent—Print this At Once”. Wearily, Ridley laid it aside. This was, perhaps, the voice of the people, and the voice of the people, no editor is ever permitted to forget, is the voice of God. It was a pity, he reflected, that God’s utterances needed such a lot of editorial revision.

Disposing of the remainder of the morning’s mail was easy. Ridley ran his fingers quickly through it: propaganda, some of it expert and much of it amateurish, from a dozen bureaux maintained by a dozen foreign Governments. The Bellman was invited to espouse two opposed causes in India; it was offered a ringing denunciation of the partition of Ireland; it was urged to celebrate the 25oth anniversary of a French poet whom Ridley could not recall having heard of; it was reminded of seven quaint celebrations which would take place in Britain during November.

There were four long mimeographed statements from four trades unions, setting forth extremely complex grievances which the Government was admonished to settle at once. There was a pamphlet from a society which wanted to reform the calendar and had received the permission of Ecuador, Liberia, Iceland and the Latvian Government-in-exile to go ahead and do it. There was a mass of material from United Nations. There were five printed communications of varying length from religious and charitable societies. There was something stamped “Newsflash” in red ink, advertising a new oil well in terms which were not intended to sound like advertisement. A blue-book, to which was attached the visiting card of a Cabinet Minister, presented a mass of valuable statistics, eighteen months out of date. Four packages offered The Bellman new comic strips of unparalleled funniness, which Ridley read through with undisturbed gravity.