"DUTCH MAIL."

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3676, 26 April 1883, Page 4

"DUTCH MAIL."

A New York paper says that England can boast one editor at least who might be trusted to run a country paper in the United Slates. In his youth Sir Richard Phillipps edited and published a paper at Leicester called the "Herald." One day an articlu appeared in it headed " Dutch Mail, and added to it was an announcement that it had arrived too late for translation, aud so had been set up in the original. This wondrous article drove half England crazy, and for years the best Dutch Scholars squabbled and pored over it without being able to arrive at any idea of what it meant. This fanions "Dutch Mail" wa* in reality merely a column of "pie." "Pie," it may be as well to explain, is a jumble of odd letters set on end to save their faces from being scraped, to be distributed at the leisure of the printers in their proper places. Some letters are upwide down, often ten or twelve consonants or as many vowels come together, and the whole is peppered with punctuations, dashes and so on, till it might pass for poetry by a lunatic Choctaw. The story Sir Richard tells of the particular "pie" he had a whole hand in is this— "One evening, before one of our publications, my man and a boy overturned two or three columns of the paper iv type. We had to got ready in some way for the coaches, which, at four in the morning, required four or five hundred paper's. After every exertion, we were short nearly a column: but there stood on the galleys a tempting column of pie. It suddenly struck me that this might, be thought Dutch. I made up tho column, overcame the scruples of the foreman, and :•; .iv,«,y the country edition went, with ita philological puzzle, to worry the honest agricul-

tural reader's head. There Avas plenty of time to set up a column of plain English for the local edition."

Sir Richard tells of one man, Avhom he met in Nottingham, who for thirty-four years preserved a copy of the " Leicester Herald," hoping that some day the letter would be explained.