The Titusville Courier of this morning, speaking of the disastrous fire of night before last, commences its article as follows:

“Petroleum Centre, the Sodom and Gomorrah of Pennsylvania, has experienced a visitation of the punishment hurled on the Sodom of scriptural renown. To be sure it was not entirely destroyed, nor was it, so far as we have heard, visited with burning brimstone, but it was visited with fire and what was about as bad — burning oil — and a large portion of the place was entirely destroyed.”

We are at a loss to understand what object the astute scribbler of that great big little sheet, composed almost entirely of other men’s brains, bad in view in thus basely and wickedly traducing the businessmen who lost their all by the destructive element, or the thirty or forty families rendered houseless and homeless in the dead bours of the night by the same painful event.

Now for facts. No longer ago than last week the individual with soap locks and a carroty mustache, connected with that mammoth nothing, called on our citizens and in a pitiful and whining manner solicited advertising and other patronage to sustain the sinking fortunes of that concern, and was treated handsomely by our businessmen generally. The above slander is the return for the kind and obliging manner they were trusted while in the Centre.

More facts. Out of the sixty odd buildings burned, just six of the “smoky shanties” were used for other than legitimate purposes. And further, not long since at least two of the very respectable editors of that sheet visited our “Sodom and Gomorrah” and indulged in excesses that respectable men would blush at. So much for them at present, but more anon if necessary.

And now we leave it to the unfortunates who lost all by the [fire], and to those in business, [who] although not losers by the fire, sympathize with those who did, if the unkind and base slander published in the Courier is called for or has any foundation in fact. From all such maligners may our citizens be delivered.