Warm tribute is due above the rest to the truehearted yoke fellow of my newspaper life. No director of any journal in the United States sustained the best traditions of his craft more faithfully than did the Samuel Bowles with whom I was associated in loyal and amicable relation from 1873 until his death on March 14, 1915. He began regular work on the paper after I had served one year under his father, and succeeded to control in 1878. He had fine ability directed by an ever sensitive conscience. Unflinchingly would he have gone to the stake for convictions' sake, had the need arisen. He was as serious and single-minded in the discharge of every duty, public and private, as any preacher of the Puritans could have been. The finer side of social life appealed to him and he adorned it. He was strong, reticent but kindly of heart, and responsive to every worthy appeal life made. A competent writer when he chose to take the pen, he was a thorough man of business, who guided the paper with prudence and wise judgment. Every part of the establishment was responsible to him, and he directed all with unwearying attention. He was not unresponsive to new developments in the art of newspaper making and progressed along well-considered lines, but never permitted the Republican to depart from the standards of service he had inherited and in which he gloried. To the uttermost he was faithful to the trust committed to his hands.

VI

A SMALL CITY'S PERSONALITIES

HUMAN nature does not differ with one's location. The newspaper worker who will master the types of men and women in a small city has qualified himself for understanding life in the world's capitals. But such acquirement cannot be gathered in a year's harvest, for knowledge is cumulative wherever one is. Youth yearns for great things, and does not apprehend that the possibilities of them lie about us. They are there for the finding, and some day the fact gets into the consciousness. Then to the seeing eye no book or drama surpasses in gripping interest the daily life amid which we move, and wherein we have our share. Tragedy and comedy, pain and joy, gloom and fellowship, are in Podunk and in the great cities, and were in the old Springfield as they are in the new. And everything focuses in the newspaper office. There is the vantage point from which to see and learn of humanity.

The Springfield directories up to the seventies were in size and contents not much bulkier than the Webster's Spelling Book of a boyhood not then distant. Then followed the present standard volume, which was to grow in pages with the city's advance in population up to the huge volumes of to-day.

How the chords of memory are set tingling as one's eye runs down the pages of names in the directory of 1872-1873!

With the end of the Civil War only seven years in the background, the number of former volunteer soldiers in official positions did not seem disproportionate. General Horace C. Lee presided over the post-office in the Haynes Hotel block, and had ten clerks and two letter carriers to supervise, along with four branch offices. The genial Major Samuel B. Spooner was mayor, and the office added a thousand dollars to his income as register of probate.

Colonel William S. Shurtleff was judge of probate, and entrenched himself in the affections of the people. He had literary tastes, and wrote verse well above the mediocre. He was a pleasing public speaker. Nature made him a gentleman. His interest in people was genuine, and there was no more delightful companion in the city. When death took him at sixty years of age there was such an outpouring of all sorts and conditions of men and women at his funeral in the Church of the Unity as left its ineffaceable impression of general respect and affection.

Colonel Henry M. Phillips, later to be mayor and useful in many ways, was in the common council; as was Elijah A. Newell, afterwards to be the longtime city clerk.

Marcus P. Knowlton was president of the common council, on the way to becoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. The chief of the State's highest tribunal at that time