Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our “flush times.” The saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the gambling¹ dens², the brothels and the jails—unfailing signs of high prosperity in a mining region—in any region for that matter. Is it not so? A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty. Still, there is one other sign; it comes last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil³ that the “flush times” are at the flood. This is the birth of the “literary” paper. The Weekly Occidental, “devoted to literature,” made its appearance in Virginia. All the literary people were engaged to write for it. Mr. F. was to edit it. He was a felicitous⁵ skirmisher with a pen, and a man who could say happy things in a crisp, neat way. Once, while editor of the union, he had disposed of a labored⁶, incoherent, two-column attack made upon him by a contemporary, with a single line, which, at first glance, seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment—viz.: “THE LOGIC⁷ OF OUR ADVERSARY⁸ RESEMBLES THE PEACE OF GOD,”—and left it to the reader’s memory and after-thought to invest the remark with another and “more different” meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure the rest of the Scripture—“in that it passeth understanding.” He once said of a little, half-starved, wayside community that had no subsistence except what they could get by preying⁹ upon chance passengers who stopped over with them a day when traveling by the overland stage, that in their Church service they had altered the Lord’s Prayer to read: “Give us this day our daily stranger!”