Now the trouble with an American paper is that it has no discrimination; it rakes the whole earth for blood and garbage, and the result is that you are daily overfed and suffer a surfeit.

By habit you stow this muck every day, but you come by and by to take no vital interest in it--indeed, you almost get tired of it.

As a rule, forty-nine-fiftieths of it concerns strangers only--people away off yonder, a thousand miles, two thousand miles, ten thousand miles from where you are.

Why, when you come to think of it, who cares what becomes of those people?
I would not give the assassination of one personal friend for a whole massacre of those others.

And, to my mind, one relative or neighbor mixed up in a scandal is more interesting than a whole Sodom and Gomorrah of outlanders gone rotten.