Today the Gazette comes before you under a new management. In assuming the responsibility of publishing the same we feel that we are accepting a public trust, which can be held only so long as we can fill it acceptably to the people of this town and county. This feeling comes to us when we remember how, week after week for many years, the paper has come to your firesides, until the people have learned to look upon it as one of the veteran institutions of the Island, to be sustained and supported accordingly.

After an unequal contest of more than four years at the editorial chair of the VINEYARD GAZETTE we resign our duties to other hands. We do not drop the pen without regret, for, with the many unpleas­ant issues that arise from such a position, there must be some agreeable associations to which, in all coming time, we shall look back with pleasure, and shall only regret that mingled with these associations there should be some unpleasant memories of the perversity and selfishness of humanity.

 

The seventeenth volume of the Gazette closed with its last issue, and to-day it enters upon a new year with a new editor and proprietor. The undersigned, after seventeen years of constant labor, as editor of the paper, retires, and Mr. James M. Cooms, Jr., a graduate of the office, assumes the entire control of the establishment. I know Mr.