I forwarded this to General Greely and kept her
suspended for seven days. She never offended again, and the last I
heard of her she was in Key West gazing with longing eyes towards the
Pearl of the Antilles. She never reached there.
The other woman correspondent was different. She was an American widow,
bright, dashing and vivacious. She had heard of the ogre of a censor;
she would conquer him through his susceptibility. I'll admit that the
censor in question was susceptible of some things--but not in business
matters. One day she filed an innocent little telegram to her paper,
saying, "For ice cream read typhoid." The operator glanced at it and
said, "You'll have to get Captain B----'s O. K. on that message before I
can send it."
She talked sweetly to him, but that didn't happen to be one of his
"susceptible" days. Then she came to me, and as my "susceptibility" had
run to a pretty low ebb I refused to permit the message to go on, on
account of its hidden meaning.
"Oh, pshaw! Captain, I wrote a story for my paper and in it described
the death of a man from the effects of eating too much ice cream, and
now I learn that he died of typhoid fever.
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