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Updated: June 14, 2025
A few days after the Sinclair-Handy wedding a particularly gorgeous affair in one of the stone churches, which had been written up by the bride's mother, as the whole town knew, in a most disgusting manner Mehronay sat chuckling in his corner, writing something which he put on the copy-hook before going out on his beat.
Mehronay knew the gospel hymns by heart, as he seemed to know his New Testament, and the cunning revivalist kept the song service going for an hour. When Mehronay was thoroughly sober there was a short prayer, and the singer on the platform feelingly sang "There Were Ninety and Nine" with an adagio movement, and Mehronay's face was wet with tears and he rose for prayers.
The day before Mehronay's wedding a child died over near the railroad, and on the morning he was to be married we found this on the copy hook when we came down to open the office, after Mehronay had gone to claim his bride: "A ten-line item appeared in last night's paper, away down in one corner, that brought more hearts together in a common bond the bond of fear and sympathy and sorrow than any other item has done for a long time.
But we in the office knew that Mehronay's Easter sermon had come as the offering of a contrite heart. It is in so many scrapbooks in the town that it should be reprinted here that the town may know that Mehronay wrote it. It read: "The celebration of Easter is the celebration of the renewal of life after the death that prevails in winter.
His self-respect grew slowly, but finally it returned, and he sat at his desk turning off reams of copy so good that the people read the paper up one side and down the other hunting for his items. He is the only man we have ever had around the paper who could write. Everyone else we have employed has been a news-gatherer. But Mehronay cared little for what we call news.
And yet they did live and move in the world that was, and the other day when we were looking over the files we came across the work of Simon Mehronay, the name which he said was spelled Dutch and sounded Irish, and it does not seem fair to set down the stories of the others who have made our office traditions without giving some account of him.
Indeed they used to say that he was not admitted to the bar, at all, but that when he came to town, in 1871, he erased his dead brother's name on a law diploma and substituted his own. Still, he practised on the law as Simon Mehronay used to say of Handy and for twenty years carried an advertisement in Eastern farm journals proclaiming that his specialty was Kansas collections.
No one ever referred to him as Mr. Mehronay, and before he had been on the street six months he was calling people by their first names, or by nicknames, which he tagged onto them.
We have never had a boom in subscription that did not begin with a lot of angry citizens coming in to stop the paper. It became known about town who wrote the Keene article, and Mehronay became in a small way a public character. We encouraged him to write more, so every morning the first proof slips that came in began to have on them ten or a dozen short items of Mehronay's writing.
The two young men were grinning, but Mehronay looked at the floor in a study as he said: "Well, to be honest damfino if I ever did just exactly."
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