This caused the spider to fall into the river, from where a supper-hunting swallow quickly rescued him.
"You remind me," he said, "of a scene I once witnessed in the office of _The Daily_--well, in the office of a certain daily newspaper.

It was the dead season, and things were somewhat slow.

An endeavour had been made to launch a discussion on the question 'Are Babies a Blessing ?' The youngest reporter on the staff, writing over the simple but touching signature of 'Mother of Six,' had led off with a scathing, though somewhat irrelevant, attack upon husbands, as a class; the Sporting Editor, signing himself 'Working Man,' and garnishing his contribution with painfully elaborated orthographical lapses, arranged to give an air of verisimilitude to the correspondence, while, at the same time, not to offend the susceptibilities of the democracy (from whom the paper derived its chief support), had replied, vindicating the British father, and giving what purported to be stirring midnight experiences of his own.

The Gallery Man, calling himself, with a burst of imagination, 'Gentleman and Christian,' wrote indignantly that he considered the agitation of the subject to be both impious and indelicate, and added he was surprised that a paper holding the exalted, and deservedly popular, position of _The_ -- - should have opened its columns to the brainless vapourings of 'Mother of Six' and 'Working Man.' "The topic had, however, fallen flat.

With the exception of one man who had invented a new feeding-bottle, and thought he was going to advertise it for nothing, the outside public did not respond, and over the editorial department gloom had settled down.
"One evening, as two or three of us were mooning about the stairs, praying secretly for a war or a famine, Todhunter, the town reporter, rushed past us with a cheer, and burst into the Sub-editor's room.