Homeburg Memories

the Post-Offi

t I don't seem able to find it. Even the Chicago baseball scores are hidden in the blamed things. Instead of putting them first, the way they ought to, they stick them down at the end of the page. As for the editorial pages, I might as well go to Labrador and hunt for personal friends as to read them. If there's any

thout banging into the want ads when you want to find the editorials, and tripping over the poets' column when you are hunting for the crop reports. You've been buying a paper every time you turned a corner for the last week, Jim-you New Yorkers seem to have to have a paper about

e on your new subway, and whether or not the temperature of Mrs. Van Damexpense's second-best Siberian wolf-hound is still rising. That's what newspapers are for-to save you the troubl

ed in San Francisco or murdered in Chicago. People who depend on it don't know yet that war has been declared in the Balkans, and they won't hear any more politics until 1916. All week long I think as little about the paper as all this. But somehow, when Thurs

to go home without the paper. We've read it for twenty years, and every week we open it up and poke through its internals after a sensation that will stand Homeburg on its ear and split the

here isn't any reason for the Democrat being late any more than there is for the branch accommodation train, which got almost to town on time once and stood beyond the crossing for twenty minutes because her conductor forgot just when she was due and didn't want to run in too soon. The Democrat is just late naturally. It's part of its function to be late. Makes it more eagerly sought after. We talk with the foreman and

ress," he says. "Give it to me and I'll read it aloud down

hem on the face with his big wooden plane, and he and the old man lug them out into the pressroom while we

of the old press, and in five minutes more Editor Ayers comes out

t, boys,"

en the sheet and look carefully down the page where old man Ayers generally conceals his local news. For a minute or

Miss Ollie Mingle has gone to Paynesville for a two days' visit (aha, that Paynesville young man's folks are going to look her over), and that Mrs. Ackley is visiting her daughter in Ogallala, Neb. (Unless Ackley straightens up, we don't expect her back.) Wimble Horn is erecting a new porch and painting his house. (He must have beaten the bucket shop for once.)

oes not jar the country quite so extensively as it would if Miss Hawkes belonged to one of your leading New York families, and was employing an eleven-thousand-dollar physicia

to the world through the Democrat. Mrs. Maloney's pneumonia and Banker Payley's quinsy grieve the town in the same paragraph under the heading "Among our sick." The Widow Swanson's ten-mile trip down the line to a neighboring town gets as careful attention as Mrs. Singer's annual pilgrimage to California. In the matter of news we are a pure democracy. The man who buys a new automobile gets no more space than the member of Patrick McQuinn's section crew who scores a clean scoop by digging his potatoes on

y of the Creation down into less than the six hundred words which the Bible wasted on it. But Editor Ayers could give all your editors instructions in this

he particulars but those who were on the ground at the time say that it was a successful af

se of wasting a lot of space on a big item because by the time the Democrat comes out, everybody knows all about it, and the mere facts would be stale and unimportant beside the superstructure of soaring fancy which has been built up by the easy-running imaginations of our chief news dispensers on the street corners. And so, when the creamery burns down or the evening fast freight runs through an accommodatio

go into a store that I don't see old man Ayers trying to collect a little cash on an advertising account or wheedling a subscriber into coming out of the misty past and creeping cautiously down a few years toward the present on his subscription account. If there is anything which we can't do without and for which we positively object to paying real money, it is our home newspaper. Sim Bone has a roaring shoe bus

ising account there was traded out. He told me once that he has taken disk-plows, flaxseed, magazines, encyclopedias and a new back porch in trade for advertising and subscriptions, but that he has been wearing an obsolete pair of spectacles, to his great discomfort, for ten years, because our local jeweler will not advertise. The doct

des for fifteen dollars. But the fifteen dollars is cash-he doesn't have to take the stuff in trade. And so we are forever running into such thrilling headlines as, "Horrible Wreck," "Her escape was simply marvelous," "Worse than the Titanic Disaster," in the Democrat's local page. And then we exclaim: "Hurray! Real news at last," and prowl eagerly down the items only to find that the horrible wreck was a citizen of S

it. But times have changed. We don't stand in awe of the Democrat any more. Most of us laugh at it, even those of us who are not financiers enough to keep our subscriptions called up. We call it the "Weekly Gimlet" and the "Poorly Democrat," and we make bright remarks to old man Ayers when he asks us for news and tell him that he ought to turn the paper inside out so that we can read the boiler plate first and not have to wade through his st

him that his wife considered the Democrat to be the best paper she had ever seen. He let Ayers burst a couple of buttons from his vest in his swelling pride before he explained that the Democrat, when cut in two, ex

edding cake is the only news in it? Where the city marshal hasn't made an arrest for two years because no one has done anything after nine p.m. except snore, and where they have to put up the lamps in pairs to keep them from getting lonesome? We don't print news from Homeburg because there isn't any, and the old rooster who joshed us knows it. He's sore because we can't make half a column out of his trip to Paynesville eight

ting the hard-shell Democrats and blown-in-the-bottle Republicans who have to stand by their papers whether they get mad at them or not. I've been taking the Democrat for about five years because Simpson got too busy in the school election one year to suit me. It's pretty hard on me, because Simpson runs a better

ession to the Argus, Ayers looks on him as a man who has stabbed him in the back and has twisted the sword. If the Board of Education spends $67 for commencement invitations with the Democrat one year and $69.50 with the Argus the next, things aren't exactly calm and peaceable again until the discrimination has been explained. When twins come to a ma

on the other hand, says Ayers prints 750 papers merely from force of habit-that most of his subscribers have been trying to stop the paper for years and can't. Lafe says that when a man puts his name on Ayers's subscription list, he might as well carve it in stone and then try to wipe it off wi

o keep one of them quiet on some public project so that the other will not jump on it. We had a big time, when the plan to pave Main Street was going through

he had lots of time in which to start it, but it was a great comfort and held Simpson level. When Simpson bought the building in which the Argus is printed, it nearly killed Ayers, who couldn't have bought the sign on his building. But he finally prevai

gets clear over and has a chance to swell around for a minute with his new-born paper in plain sight, watching the mad foreman lock up the forms. The first paper into the post-office gets distributed first, while the subscribers of the other paper hang around in a state of frenzy and waver in their allegiance in a manner to make the stoutest heart quail. And one of the weekly diversions in Homeburg is watching this race. If it isn't too late in starting, we hang around and make mild bets on the result. One week old man Ayers and his foreman will hurry out from the Democrat office and trot hastily over to the post-office carrying the week's issue of the p

ef, or a few odd size grindstones on account; but of late he has had to dun us every year, and of course that makes us mad, and we quit his paper with great frequency and vim. I don't know what would have happened to the old man if Wilson hadn't been elected. But that, of course, has settled things for him. He will be our next postmaster. Every one has conceded that exc

s to third-class editors, anyway. It's the only chance they have of accumulating enough of a su