Ours is a little town in that part of the country called the West by those who live east of the Alleghanies, and referred to lovingly as "back East" by those who dwell west of the Rockies. It is a country town where, as the song goes, "you know everybody and they all know you," and the country newspaper office is the social clearing-house.

When a man has published a paper in a country community for many years, he knows his town and its people, their strength and their weakness, their joys and their sorrows, their failings and their prosperity—or if he does not know these things, he is on the road to failure, for this knowledge must be the spirit of his paper. The country editor and his reporters sooner or later pass upon everything that interests their town.

In our little newspaper office we are all reporters, and we know many intimate things about our people that we do not print. We know, for instance, which wives will not let their husbands endorse other men's notes at the banks. We know about the row the Baptists are having to get rid of the bass singer in their choir, who has sung at funerals for thirty years, until it has reached a point where all good Baptists dread death on account of his lugubrious profundo. Perhaps we should take this tragedy to heart, but we know that the Methodists are having the same trouble with their soprano, who "flats"—and has flatted for ten years, and is too proud to quit the choir "under fire" as she calls it; and we remember what a time the Congregationalists had getting rid of their tenor. So that choir troubles are to us only a part of the grist that keeps the mill going.

As the merest incident of the daily grind, it came to the office that the bank cashier, whose retirement we announced with half a column of regret, was caught $3500 short, after twenty years of faithful service, and that his wife sold the homestead to make his shortage good. We know the week that the widower sets out, and we hear with remarkable accuracy just when he has been refused by this particular widow or that, and, when he begins on a school-teacher, the whole office has candy and cigar and mince pie bets on the result, with the odds on the widower five to one. We know the woman who is always sent for when a baby comes to town, and who has laid more good people of the community in their shrouds than all the undertakers. We know the politician who gets five dollars a day for his "services" at the polls, the man who takes three dollars and the man who will work for the good of the cause in the precious hope of a blessed reward at some future county convention. To know these things is not a matter of pride; it is not a source of annoyance or shame; it is part of the business.

Though our loathed but esteemed contemporary, the Statesman, speaks of our town as "this city," and calls the marshal "chief of police," we are none the less a country town. Like hundreds of its kind, our little daily newspaper is equipped with typesetting machines and is printed from a web perfecting press, yet it is only a country newspaper, and knowing this we refuse to put on city airs. Of course we print the afternoon Associated Press report on the first page, under formal heads and with some pretence of dignity, but that first page is the parlour of the paper, as it is of most of its contemporaries, and in the other pages they and we go around in our shirt sleeves, calling people by their first names; teasing the boys and girls good-naturedly; tickling the pompous members of the village family with straws from time to time, and letting out the family secrets of the community without much regard for the feelings of the supercilious.

Nine or ten thousand people in our town go to bed on this kind of mental pabulum, as do country-town dwellers all over the United States, and although we do not claim that it is helpful, we do contend that it does not hurt them. Certainly by poking mild fun at the shams—the town pharisees—we make it more difficult to maintain the class lines which the pretenders would establish. Possibly by printing the news of everything that happens, suppressing nothing "on account of the respectability of the parties concerned," we may prevent some evil-doers from going on with their plans, but this is mere conjecture, and we do not set it down to our credit. What we maintain is that in printing our little country dailies, we, the scribes, from one end of the world to the other, get more than our share of fun out of life as we go along, and pass as much of it on to our neighbours as we can spare.

Suppressing nothing "on account of the respectability of the parties concerned"

Because we live in country towns, where the only car-gongs we hear are on the baker's waggon, and where the horses in the fire department work on the streets, is no reason why city dwellers should assume that we are natives. We have no dialect worth recording—save that some of us Westerners burr our "r's" a little or drop an occasional final "g." But you will find that all the things advertised in the backs of the magazines are in our houses, and that the young men in our towns walking home at midnight, with their coats over their arms, whistle the same popular airs that lovelorn boys are whistling in New York, Portland, San Francisco or New Orleans that same fine evening. Our girls are those pretty, reliant, well-dressed young women whom you see at the summer resorts from Coronado Beach to Buzzard's Bay. In the fall and winter these girls fill the colleges of the East and the State universities of the West. Those wholesome, frank, good-natured people whom you met last winter at the Grand Cañons and who told you of the funny performance of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in Yiddish at the People's Theatre on the East Side in New York, and insisted that you see the totem pole in Seattle; and then take a cottage for a month at Catalina Island; who gave you the tip about Abson's quaint little beefsteak chop-house up an alley in Chicago, who told you of Mrs. O'Hagan's second-hand furniture shop in Charleston, where you can get real colonial stuff dirt cheap—those people are our leading citizens, who run the bank or the dry-goods store or the flour-mill. At our annual arts and crafts show we have on exhibition loot from the four corners of the earth, and the club woman who has not heard it whispered around in our art circles that Mr. Sargent is painting too many portraits lately, and that a certain long-legged model whose face is familiar in the weekly magazines is no better than she should be—a club woman in our town who does not know of these things is out of caste in clubdom, and women say of her that she is giving too much time to her church.

We take all the beautiful garden magazines, and our terra-cotta works are turning out creditable vases—which we pronounce "vahzes," you may be sure—for formal gardens. And though we men for the most part run our own lawnmowers, and personally look after the work of the college boy who takes care of the horse and the cow for his room, still there are a few of us proud and haughty creatures who have automobiles, and go snorting around the country scaring horses and tooting terror into the herds by the roadside. But the bright young reporters on our papers do not let an automobile come to town without printing an item stating its make and its cost, and whether or not it is a new one or a second-hand one, and what speed it can make. At the flower parade in our own little town last October there were ten automobiles in line, decked with paper flowers and laden with pretty girls in lawns and dimities and linens—though as a matter of fact most of the linens were only "Indian head." And our particular little country paper printed an item to the effect that the real social line of cleavage in the town lies not between the cut-glass set and the devotees of hand-painted china, but between the real nobility who wear genuine linen and the base imitations who wear Indian head.

In some towns an item like that would make people mad, but we have our people trained to stand a good deal. They know that it costs them five cents a line for cards of thanks and resolutions of respect, so they never bring them in. They know that our paper never permits "one who was there" to report social functions, so that dear old correspondent has resigned; and because we have insisted for years on making an item about the first tomatoes that are served in spring at any dinner or reception, together with the cost per pound of the tomatoes, the town has become used to our attitude and does not buzz with indignation when we poke a risible finger at the homemade costumes of the Plymouth Daughters when they present "The Mikado" to pay for the new pipe-organ. Indeed, so used is the town to our ways that when there was great talk last winter about Mrs. Frelingheysen for serving fresh strawberries over the ice cream at her luncheon in February, just after her husband had gone through bankruptcy, she called up Miss Larrabee, our society editor, on the telephone and asked her to make a little item saying that the strawberries served by Mrs. Frelingheysen at her luncheon were not fresh, but merely sun dried. This we did gladly and printed her recipe. So used is this town to our school teachers resigning to get married that when one resigns for any other reason we make it a point to announce in the paper that it is not for the usual reason, and tell our readers exactly what the young woman is going to do.

So, gradually, without our intending to establish it, a family vernacular has grown up in the paper which our people understand, but which—like all other family vernaculars—is Greek to those outside the circle. Thus we say:

"Bill Parker is making his eighth biennial distribution of cigars to-day for a boy."

City papers would print it:

"Born to Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Parker, a baby boy."

Again we print this item:

"Mrs. Merriman is getting ready to lend her fern to the Nortons, June 15."

That doesn't mean anything, unless you happen to know that Mrs. Merriman has the prettiest Boston fern in town, and that no bow-window is properly decorated at any wedding without that fern. In larger towns the same news item would appear thus:

"Cards are out announcing the wedding of Miss Cecil Norton and Mr. Collis R. Hatcher at the home of the bride's parents, Mr. and Mrs. T. J. Norton, 1022 High street, June 15."

A plain drunk is generally referred to in our columns as a "guest of Marshal Furgeson's informal house-party," and when a group of drunk-and-disorderlies is brought in we feel free to say of their evening diversion that they "spent the happy hours, after refreshments, playing progressive hell." And this brings us to the consideration of the most important personage with whom we have to deal. In what we call "social circles," the most important personages are Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington and Mrs. Priscilla Winthrop Conklin, who keep two hired girls and can pay five dollars a week for them when the prevailing price is three. In financial circles the most important personage is John Markley, who buys real-estate mortgages; in political circles the most important personage is Charlie Hedrick who knows the railroad attorneys at the capital and always can get passes for the county delegation to the State convention; in the railroad-yards the most important personage is the division superintendent, who smokes ten-cent cigars and has the only "room with a bath" at the Hotel Metropole. But with us, in the publication of our newspaper, the most important personage in town is Marshal Furgeson.

If you ever looked out of the car-window as you passed through town, you undoubtedly saw him at the depot, walking nervously up and down the platform, peering into the faces of strangers. He is ever on the outlook for crooks, though nothing more violent has happened in our county for years than an assault and battery. But Marshal Furgeson never relinquishes his watch. In winter, clad in his blue uniform and campaign hat, he is a familiar figure on our streets; and in summer, without coat or vest, with his big silver star on which is stamped "Chief of Police," pinned to his suspender, he may be seen at any point where trouble is least likely to break out. He is the only man on the town site whom we are afraid to tease, because he is our chief source of news; for if we ruffle his temper he sees to it that our paper misses the details of the next chicken-raid that comes under his notice. He can bring us to time in short order.

When we particularly desire to please him we refer to him as "the authorities." If the Palace Grocery has been invaded through the back window and a box of plug tobacco stolen, Marshal Furgeson is delighted to read in the paper that "the authorities have an important clew and the arrest may be expected at any time." He is "the authorities." If "the authorities have their eyes on a certain barber-shop on South Main Street, which is supposed to be doing a back-door beer business," he again is "the authorities," and contends that the word strikes more terror into the hearts of evil-doers than the mere name, Marshal Furgeson.

Next in rank to "the authorities," in the diplomatic corps of the office, come our advertisers: the proprietors of the White Front Dry-Goods Store, the Golden Eagle Clothing Store, and the Bee Hive. These men can come nearer to dictating the paper's policy than the bankers and politicians, who are supposed to control country newspapers. Though we are charged with being the "organ" of any of half-a-dozen politicians whom we happen to speak of kindly at various times, we have little real use for politicians in our office, and a business man who brings in sixty or seventy dollars' worth of advertising every month has more influence with us than all the politicians in the county. This is the situation in most newspaper offices that succeed, and when any other situation prevails, when politicians control editors, the newspapers don't pay well, and sooner or later the politicians are bankrupt.

The only person in town whom all the merchants desire us to poke fun at is Mail-Order Petrie. Mail-Order Petrie is a miserly old codger who buys everything out of town that he can buy a penny cheaper than the home merchants sell it. He is a hard-working man, so far as that goes, and so stingy that he has been accused of going barefooted in the summer time to save shoes. When he is sick he sends out of town for patent medicines, and for ten years he worked in his truck-garden, fighting floods and droughts, bugs and blight, to save something like a hundred dollars, which he put in a mail-order bank in St. Louis. When it failed he grinned at the fellows who twitted him of his loss, and said: "Oh, come easy, go easy!"

A few years ago he subscribed to a matrimonial paper, and one day he appeared at the office of the probate judge with a mail-order wife, who, when they had been married a few years, went to an orphan asylum and got a mail-order baby. We have had considerable sport with Mail-Order Petrie, and he has become so used to it that he likes it. Sometimes on dull days he comes around to the office to tell us what a bargain he got at this or that mail-order house, and last summer he came in to tell us about a great bargain in a cemetery lot in a new cemetery being laid out in Kansas City; he bought it on the installment plan, a dollar down and twenty-five cents a month, to be paid until he died, and he bragged a great deal about his shrewdness in getting the lot on those terms. He chuckled as he said that he would be dead in five years at the most and would have a seventy-five dollar lot for a mere song. He made us promise that when that time does come we will write up his obsequies under the head "A Mail-Order Funeral." He added, as he stood with his hand on the door screen, that he had no use for the preachers and the hypocrites in the churches in this town, and that he was taking a paper called the "Magazine of Mysteries," that teaches some new ideas on religion and that he expects to wind up in a mail-order Heaven.

And this is the material with which we do our day's work—Mail-Order Petrie, Marshal Furgeson, the pretty girls in the flower parade, the wise clubwomen, the cut-glass society crowd, the proud owner of the automobile, the "respectable parties concerned," the proprietor of the Golden Eagle, the clerks in the Bee Hive, the country crook who aspires to be a professional criminal some day, "the leading citizen," who spends much of his time seeing the sights of his country, the college boys who wear funny clothes and ribbons on their hats, and the politicians, greedy for free advertising. They are ordinary two-legged men and women, and if there is one thing more than any other that marks our town, it is its charity, and the mercy that is at the bottom of all its real impulses.

Our business seems to outsiders to be a cruel one, because we have to deal as mere business with such sacred things as death and birth, the meeting and parting of friends, and with tragedies as well as with comedies. This is true. Every man—even a piano tuner—thinks his business leads him a dog's life, and that it shows him only the seamy side of the world. But our business, though it shows the seams, shows us more of good than of bad in men. We are not cynics in our office; for we know in a thousand ways that the world is good. We know that at the end of the day we have set down more good deeds than bad deeds, and that the people in our town will keep the telephone bell ringing to-morrow, more to praise the recital of a good action than they will to talk to us about some evil thing that we had to print.

Time and again we have been surprised at the charity of our people. They are always willing to forgive, and be it man or woman who takes a misstep in our town—which is the counterpart of hundreds of American towns—if the offender shows that he wishes to walk straight, a thousand hands are stretched out to help him and guide him. It is not true that a man or woman who makes a mistake is eternally damned by his fellows. If one persists in wrong after the first misdeed it is not because sheltering love and kindness were not thrown around the wrongdoer. We have in our town women who have done wrong and have lived down their errors just as men do, and have been forgiven. A hundred times in our office we have talked these things over and have been proud of our people and of their humanity. We are all neighbours and friends, and when sorrow comes, no one is alone. The town's greatest tragedies have proved the town's sympathy, and have been worth their cost.

II

The Young Prince

We have had many reporters for our little country newspaper—some good ones, who have gone up to the city and have become good newspaper men; some bad ones, who have gone back to the livery-stables from which they sprang; and some indifferent ones, who have drifted into the insurance business and have become silent partners in student boarding-houses, taking home the meat for dinner and eating finically at the second table of life, with a first table discrimination. But of all the boys who have sat at the old walnut desk by the window, the Young Prince gave us the most joy. Before he came on the paper he was bell-boy at the National Hotel—bell-hop, he called himself—and he first attracted our attention by handing in personal items written in a fat, florid hand. He seemed to have second sight. He knew more news than anyone else in town—who had gone away, who was entertaining company, who was getting married, and who was sick or dying.

The day the Young Prince went to work he put on his royal garment—a ten-dollar ready-made costume that cost him two weeks' hard work. But it was worth the effort. His freckled face and his tawny shock of red hair rose above the gorgeous plaid of the clothes like a prairie sunset, and as he pranced off down the street he was clearly proud of his job. This pride never left him. He knew all the switchmen in the railroad yards, all the girls in the dry-goods stores, all the boys on the grocers' waggons, all the hack-drivers and all the barbers in town.

These are the great sources of news for a country daily. The reporter who confines his acquaintance to doctors, lawyers, merchants and preachers is always complaining of dull days.

But there was never a dull day with the Young Prince. When he could get the list of "those present" at a social function in no other way, he called up the hired girl of the festal house—we are such a small town that only the rich bankers keep servants—and "made a date" with her, and the names always appeared in the paper the next day; whereupon the proud hostess, who thought it was bad form to give out the names of her guests, sent down and bought a dozen extra copies of the paper to send away to her Eastern kin. He knew all the secrets of the switch shanty. Our paper printed the news of a change in the general superintendent's office of the railroad before the city papers had heard of it, and we usually figured it out that the day after the letter denying our story had come down from the Superintendent's office the change would be officially announced.

One day when the Prince was at the depot "making the train" with his notebook in his hand, jotting down the names of the people who got on or off the cars, the general superintendent saw him, and called the youth to his car.

"Well, kid," said the most worshipful one in his teasingest voice, "What's the latest news at the general offices to-day?"

The Young Prince turned his head on one side like a little dog looking up at a big dog, and replied:

"Well, if you must know it, you're going to get the can, though we ain't printing it till you've got a chance to land somewhere else."

The longer the Prince worked the more clothes he bought. One of his most effective creations was a blue serge coat and vest, and a pair of white duck trousers linked by emotional red socks to patent-leather shoes. This confection, crowned with a wide, saw-edged straw hat with a blue band, made him the brightest bit of colour on the sombre streets of our dull town. He wore his collars so high that he had to order them of a drummer, and as he came down street from the depot, riding magnificently with the 'bus-driver, after the train had gone, the clerks used to cry: "Look out for your horses; the steam-piano is coming!"

But it didn't affect the Young Prince. If he happened to have time and was feeling like it, he would climb down over the rear end of the 'bus and chase his tormentor into the back of the store where he worked, but generally the Young Prince took no heed of the jibes of the envious. He was conscious that he was cutting a figure, and this consciousness made him proud. But his pride did not cut down the stack of copy that he laid on the table every morning and every noon. He couldn't spell and he was innocent of grammar, and every line he wrote had to be edited, but he got the news. He was every where. He rushed down the streets after an item, dodging in and out of stores and offices like a streak of chain lightning having a fit. But it was beneath his dignity to run to fires. When the fire-bell rang, he waited nonchalantly on the corner near the fire-department house, and as the crowds parted to let the horses dash by on the dead run, he would walk calmly to the middle of the street, put his notebook in his pocket, and, as the fire-team plunged by, he would ostentatiously throw out a stiff leg behind him like the tail of a comet, and "flip" onto the end of the fire-waggon. Then he would turn slowly around, raise a hand, and wiggle his fingers patronisingly at the girls in front of the Racket Store as he flew past, swaying his body with the motion of the rolling, staggering cart.

Other reporters who have been on the paper—the good ones as well as the bad—have had to run the gauntlet of the town jokers who delight to give green reporters bogus news, or start them out hunting impossible items. But the man who soberly told the Young Prince that O. F. C. Taylor was visiting at the home of the town drunkard, or that W. H. McBreyer had accepted a position in a town drug-store, only got a wink and a grin from the boy. Neither did the town wags fool him by giving him a birth announcement from the wrong family, nor a wedding where there was none. He was wise as a serpent. Where he got his wisdom, no one knows. He had the town catalogued in a sort of rogues' directory—the liars and the honest men set apart from one another, and it was a classification that would not have tallied with the church directories nor with the town blue-book nor with the commercial agency's reports. The sheep and the goats in the Young Prince's record would have been strangers to one another if they could have been assembled as he imagined them. But he was generally right in his estimates of men. He had a sixth sense for sham.

The Young Prince had the sense to know the truth and the courage to write it. This is the essence of the genius that is required to make a good newspaper man. No paper has trouble getting reporters who can hand in copy that records events from the outside. Any blockhead can go to a public meeting and bring in a report that has the words "as follows" scattered here and there down the columns. But the reporter who can go and bring back the soul of the meeting, the real truth about it—what the inside fights meant that lay under the parliamentary politenesses of the occasion; who can see the wires that reach back of the speakers, and see the man who is moving the wires and can know why he is moving them; who can translate the tall talking into history—he is a real reporter. And the Young Prince was that kind of a youth. He went to the core of everything; and if we didn't dare print the truth—as sometimes we did not—he grumbled for a week about his luck. As passionately as he loved his clothes, he was always ready to get them dirty in the interests of his business.

For three years his nimble feet pounded the sidewalks of the town. He knew no business hours, and ate and slept with his work. He never ceased to be a reporter—never took off his make-up, never let down from his exalted part. One day he fell sick of a fever, and for three weeks fretted and fumed in delirium. In his dreams he wrote pay locals, and made trains, and described funerals, got lists of names for the society column, and grumbled because his stuff was cut or left over till the next day. When he awoke he was weak and wan, and they felt that they must tell him the truth.

The doctor took the boy's hands and told him very simply what they feared. He looked at the man for a moment in dumb wonder, and sighed a long, tired sigh. Then he said: "Well, if I must, here goes"—and turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes without a tremor.

And thus the Young Prince went home.

III

The Society Editor

They say that in the newspaper offices of the city men work in ruts; that the editorial writer never reports an item, no matter how much he knows of it; that a reporter is not allowed to express an editorial view of a subject, even though he be well qualified to speak; but on our little country daily newspaper it is entirely different. We work on the interchangeable point system. Everyone writes items, all of us get advertising and job-work when it comes our way, and when one of us writes anything particularly good, it is marked for the editorial page. The religious reporter does the racing matinée in Wildwood Park, and the financial editor who gets the market reports from the feed-store men also gets any church news that comes along.

The only time we ever established a department was when we made Miss Larrabee society editor. She came from the high school, where her graduating essay on Kipling attracted our attention, and, after an office council had decided that a Saturday society page would be a paying proposition.

At first, say for six months after she came to the office, Miss Larrabee devoted herself to the accumulation of professional pride. This pride was as much a part of her life as her pompadour, which at that time was so high that she had to tiptoe to reach it. However she managed to keep it up was the wonder of the office. Finally, we all agreed that she must use chicken-fence. She denied this, but was inclined to be good-natured about it, and, as an office-joke, the boys used to leave a step-ladder by her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really looked. Nothing ruffled her spirits, and we soon quit teasing her and began to admire her work. In addition to filling six columns of the Saturday's paper with her society report in a town where a church social is important enough to justify publishing the names of those who wait on the tables, Miss Larrabee was a credit to the office.

As an office joke the boys used to leave a step-ladder by her desk so that she could climb up and see how her top-knot really looked

She was always invited to the entertainments at the homes of the Worthingtons and the Conklins, who had stationary wash-tubs in the basements of their houses, and who ate dinner instead of supper in the evening; and when she put on what the boys called her trotting harness, her silk petticoats rustled louder than any others at the party. One day she suddenly dropped her pompadour and appeared with her hair parted in the middle and doused over her ears in long, undulating billows. No other girl in town came within a quarter of an inch of Miss Larrabee's dare. When straight-fronts became stylish, Miss Larrabee was a vertical marvel, and when she rolled up her sleeves and organized a country club, she referred to her shoes as boots and took the longest steps in town. But with it all she was no mere clothes-horse. We drilled it into her head during her first two weeks that "society" news in a country town means not merely the doings of the cut-glass set, but that it means as well the doings of the Happy Hoppers, the Trundle-Bed Trash, the Knights of Columbus, the Rathbone Sisters, the King's Daughters, the Epworth League, the Christian Endeavourers, the Woman's Relief Corps, the Ladies' Aid and the Home Missionary Societies, Miss Nelson's Dancing Class, the Switchmen's annual ball—if we get their job-work—and every kindred, every tribe, except such as gather in what is known as "kitchen sweats" and occasionally send in calls for the police. When Miss Larrabee got this into her head she began to groan under her burden, and by the end of the year, though she had great pride in her profession, she affected to loathe her department.

Weddings were her especial abominations. When the first social cloud appeared on the horizon indicating the approach of a series of showers for the bride which would culminate in a cloudburst at some stone church, Miss Larrabee would begin to rumble like distant thunder and, as the storm grew thicker, she would flash out crooked chain-lightning imprecations on the heads of the young people, their fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts. By the day of the wedding she would be rolling a steady diapason of polite, decolourised, expurgated, ladylike profanity.

While she sat at her desk writing the stereotyped account of the event, it was like picking up a live wire to speak to her. As she wrote, we could tell at just what stage she had arrived in her copy. Thus, if she said to the adjacent atmosphere, "What a whopper!" we knew that she had written, "The crowning glory of a happy fortnight of social gatherings found its place when——" and when she hissed out, "Mortgaged clear to the eaves and full of installment furniture!" we felt that she had reached a point something like this: "After the ceremony the gay party assembled at the palatial home." In a moment she would snarl: "I am dead tired of seeing Mrs. Merriman's sprawly old fern and the Bosworth palm. I wish they would stop lending them!" and then we realised that she had reached the part of her write-up which said: "The chancel rail was banked with a profusion of palms and ferns and rare tropical plants." She always groaned when she came to the "simple and impressive ring ceremony." When she wrote:

"The distinguished company came forward to offer congratulations to the newly-wedded pair," she would say as she sharpened her pencil-point: "There's nothing like a wedding to reveal what a raft of common kin people have," and we knew that it was all over and that she was closing the article with: "A dazzling array of costly and beautiful presents was exhibited in the library," for then she would pick up her copy, dog-ear the sheets, and jab them on the hook as she sighed: "Another great American pickle-dish exhibit ended."

In the way she did two things Miss Larrabee excited the wonder and admiration of the office. One was the way that she kept tab on brides. We heard through her of the brides who could cook, and of those who were beginning life by accumulating a bright little pile of tin cans in the alley. She knew the brides who could do their own sewing and those who could not. She had the single girl's sniff at the bride who wore her trousseau season after season, made over and fixed up, and she gave the office the benefit of her opinion of the husband in the case who had a new tailor-made suit every fall and spring. She scented young married troubles from afar, and we knew in the office whether his folks were edging up on her, or her people were edging up on him. If a young married man danced more than twice in one evening with anyone but his wife, Miss Larrabee made faces at his back when he passed the office window, and if she caught a young married woman flirting, Miss Larrabee regaled us by telling with whom the woman in question had opened a "fresh bottle of emotions."

The other way in which Miss Larrabee displayed genius for her work was in describing women's costumes. Three or four times a year, when there are large social gatherings, we print descriptions of the women's gowns. Only three women in our town, Mrs. Worthington, Mrs. Conklin, and the second Mrs. Markley, have more than one new party dress in a twelve-month, and most of the women make a party gown last two or three years. Miss Larrabee was familiar with every dress in town. She knew it made over, and no woman was cunning enough to conceal the truth even with a spangled yoke, a chiffon bertha, or a net over-dress; yet Miss Larrabee would describe the gown, not merely twice, but half a dozen times, so that the woman wearing it might send the description to her relatives back East without arousing their suspicion that she was wearing the same dress year after year. Therefore, whenever Miss Larrabee wrote up the dresses worn at a party, we were sure to sell from fifty to a hundred extra papers. She could so turn a breastpin and a homemade point-lace handkerchief tucked in the front of a good old lady's best black satin into "point-lace and diamonds," that they were always good for a dozen copies of the paper, and she never overlooked the dress of the wife of a good advertiser, no matter how plain it might be.

She was worth her wages to the office merely as a compendium of shams. She knew whether the bridal couple, who announced that they would spend their honeymoon in the East, were really going to Niagara Falls, or whether they were going to spend a week with his relatives in Decatur, Illinois. She knew every woman in town who bought two prizes for her whist party—one to give if her friend should win the prize, and another to give if the woman she hated should win. With the diabolical eye of a fiend she detected the woman who was wearing the dry-cleaned cast-off clothing of her sister in the city. What she saw the office knew, though she kept her conclusions out of the paper if they would do any harm or hurt anyone's feelings. No pretender ever dreamed that she was not fooling Miss Larrabee. She was willing to agree most sympathetically with Mrs. Conklin, who insisted that the "common people" wouldn't be interested in the list of names at her party; and the only place where we ever saw Miss Larrabee's claw in print was in the insistent misspelling of the name of a woman who made it a point to ridicule the paper.

We have had other girls around the office since Miss Larrabee left, but they do not seem to get the work done with any system. She was not only industrious but practical. Friday mornings, when her work piled up, instead of fussing around the office and chattering at the telephone, she would dive into her desk and bring up her regular list of adjectives. These she would copy on three slips, carefully dividing the list so that no one had a duplicate, and in the afternoon each of the boys received a slip with a list of parties, and with instructions to scatter the adjectives she had given him through the accounts of the parties assigned to him—and the work was soon done. There was no scratching the head for synonyms for "beautiful," "superb" or "elegant." Miss Larrabee had doled out to each of us the adjectives necessary, and, given the adjectives, society reporting is easy. The editing of the copy is easy also, for one does not have to remember whether or not the refreshments were "delicious" at the Jones party when he sees the word in connection with the viands at the Smith party. No two parties were ever "elegant" the same week. No two events were "charming." No two women were "exquisitely" gowned. The person who was assigned the adjective "delightful" by Miss Larrabee might stick it in front of a luncheon, pin it on a hostess, or use it for an evening's entertainment. But he could use it only once. And with a list of those present and the adjectives thereunto appertaining, even a new boy could get up a column in half an hour. She had an artist's pride in the finished work, however much she might dislike the thing in making, and she used to sail down to the press-room as soon as the paper was out, and, picking up the paper from the folder, she would stand reading her page, line upon line, precept upon precept, though every word and syllable was familiar to her.

During her first year she joined the Woman's State Press Club, but she discovered that she was the only real worker in the club and never attended a second meeting. She told us that too many of the women wore white stockings and low shoes, read their own unpublished short stories, and regarded her wide-shouldered shirtwaist and melodramatic openwork hosiery with suspicion and alarm.

As the years passed, and wedding after wedding sizzled under her pen, she complained to us that she was beginning to be called "auntie" in too many houses, and that the stock of available young men who didn't wear their handkerchiefs under their collars at the dances had dwindled down to three. This reality faces every girl who lives in a country town. Then she is left with two alternatives: to go visiting or to begin bringing them up by hand.

Miss Larrabee went visiting. At the end of a month she wrote: "It's all over with me. He is a nice fellow, and has a job doing 'Live Topics About Town' here on the Sun. Give my job to the little Wheatly girl, and tell her to quit writing poetry, and hike up her dress in the back. My adjectives are in the left-hand corner of the desk under 'When Knighthood Was in Flower.' And do you suppose you could get me and the grand keeper of the records and seals a pass home for Christmas if I'd do you a New York letter some time?

"They say these city papers are hog tight!"

IV

"As a Breath into the Wind"

We are proud of the machinery in our office—the two linotypes, the big perfecting press and the little jobbers. They are endowed by office traditions with certain human attributes—having their moods and vagaries and tantrums—so we love them as men love children. And this is a queer thing about them: though our building is pocked with windows that are open by day seven months in the year, and though the air of the building is clean enough, save for the smell of the ink, yet at night, after the machines have been idle for many hours and are probably asleep, the place smells like the lair of wild animals. By day they are as clean as machines may be kept. And even in the days when David Lewis petted them and coddled them and gave them the core of his heart, they were speckless, and bright as his big, brown, Welsh eyes, but the night stinks of them were rank and beastly.

David came to us, a stray cat, fifteen years ago. He was too small to wrestle with the forms—being cast in the nonpareil mould of his race—and so we put him to carrying papers. In school season he seemed to go to school, and in summer it is certain that he put a box on a high stool in the back room, and learned the printer's case, and fed the job presses at odd times, and edged on to the pay-roll without ever having been formally hired. In the same surreptitious manner he slipped a cot into the stockroom upstairs and slept there, and finally had it fitted up as a bedroom, and so became an office fixture.

By the time his voice had stopped squeaking he was a good printer, and what with using the front office for a study at night, and the New York papers and the magazines for textbooks, he had acquired a good working education. Whereupon he fell in love with two divinities at once—the blonde one working in the Racket Store, on Main Street, and the other, a new linotype that we installed the year before McKinley's first election. His heart was sadly torn between them. He never went to bed under midnight after calling on either of them, and, having the Celt's natural aptitude to get at the soul of either women or intricate mechanism, in a year he was engaged to both; but naturally enough a brain fever overtook him, and he lay on a cot at the Sisters' Hospital and jabbered strange things.

Among other things the priest who sat beside him one day heard Latin verse; whereat the father addressed David in the language of the Church and received reply in kind. And they talked solemnly about matters theological for five minutes, David's voice changing to the drone of the liturgist's and his face flushing with uncaged joy. In an hour there were three priests with the boy, and he spoke in Latin to them without faltering. He discussed abstruse ecclesiastical questions and claimed incidentally to be an Italian priest dead a score of years, and, to prove his claim, described Rome and the Vatican as it was before Leo's day. Then he fell asleep and the next day was better and knew no Latin, but insisted on reading the note under his pillow which his girl had sent him. After that he wanted to know how New York stood in the National League and how Hans Wagner's batting record was, and proceeded to get well in short order.

David resumed his place in the office, and when we put in the perfecting press he added another string to his bow. The press and the linotype and his girl were his life's passions, and his position as short-stop in the Maroons, and as snare-drummer in the Second Regiment band, were his diversions. He wore clothes well and became president of the Imperial Dancing Club—chiefly to please his girl, who desired social position. A boy with twelve dollars a week in a country town, who will spend a dollar or two a month to have his clothes pressed, can accomplish any social heights which rise before him, and there is no barrier in our town to a girl merely because she presides at the ribbon-counter; which, of course, is as it should be.

So David became a town personage. When the linotype operator left, we gave David the place. Now he courted only one of his sweethearts by night, and found time for other things. Also we gave him three dollars a week more to spend, and the Imperial Club got most of it—generally through the medium of the blonde in the Racket Store, who was cultivating a taste for diamonds, and liked to wear flowers at the more formal dances.

Now, unless they are about to be married, a boy of twenty may not call on a girl of nineteen in a respectable family, a member of the Plymouth Daughters, and a graduate of the High School, oftener than four nights in the week, without exciting more or less neighbourly comment; but David and the girl were merely going together—as the parlance of our town has it—and though they were engaged they had no idea of getting married at any definite time. David thus had three nights in the seven which might be called open. The big press would not receive him by night, and he spent his love on his linotype by day; so he was lonesome and longed for the society of his kind. The billiard-hall did not tempt him; but at the cigar-store he met and fell under the spell of Henry Larmy—known of the town as "Old Hen," though he was not two score years gone—and the two began chumming together.

"Old Hen" worked in a tin-shop, read Ruskin, regarded Debs as a prophet, received many papers devoted to socialism and the New Thought, and believed that he believed in no man, no God and no devil. Also he was a woman-hater, and though he never turned his head for a petticoat, preached free-love and bought many books which promised to tell him how to become a hypnotist. At various times, Larmy's category of beliefs included the single-tax, Buddhism, spiritualism, and a faith in the curative properties of blue glass. David and Henry Larmy would sit in the office of evenings discussing these things when honest people should be in bed.

Henry never could tell us just how the talk drifted to hypnotism and the occult, nor when the current started that way. But one of the reporters who happened to be driven off the street by the rain one night found Henry and David in the office with a homemade planchette doing queer things. They made it tell words in the middle of pages of newspapers that neither had opened. They made it write answers to sums that neither had calculated, and they made it give the names of Henry's relatives dead and gone—also those that were living, whom David, who was operating it, did not know. The thing would not move for the man, but the boy's fingers on it made it fly. Some way the triangular board broke, and the reporter and Henry were pop-eyed with wonder to see David hold his hands above the pencil and make it write, dragging a splinter of board behind it. David yawned five or six times and lay down on the office couch, and when he got up a moment later his hands were fingering the air, his lips fluttering like the wings of fledglings, and he seemed to be trying some new kind of lingo. He did not look about him, but went straight to the table, gripped the air above the pencil with the broken board upon it, and the pencil came up and began writing something, evidently in verse. David's face was shiny and smiling the while, but his eyes were fixed, though his lips moved as they do when one writes and is unused to it. Larmy stared at the boy with open mouth, clearly afraid of the spectacle that was before him. A night creaking of the building made him jump, and he moistened his lips as the pencil wrote on. When the sheet was filled, the pencil fell and David looked about him with a smile and dropping his head on the desk began to yawn. He seemed to be coming out of a deep sleep, and grinned up blinking: "Gee, I must 'a' gone to sleep on you fellows. I was up late last night."

Larmy told the boy what had happened, and the three of them looked at the paper, but could make nothing of it. David shook his head.

"Not on your life," he laughed. "What do you fellers take me for—a phonograph having the D. T.'s, or a mimeograph with a past? Uh-huh! Not for little David! Why—say, that is some kind of Dutch!"

The reporter knew enough to know that it was Latin, but his High School days were five years behind him, and he could not translate it. The Latin professor at the college, however, said that it seemed to be an imitation of Ovid.

And the next time the reporter saw a light in the office window he broke into the seance. When the boy and his girl were not holding down the sofa at her father's home, or when there was no dance at the Imperial Club hall, nor any other social diversion, David and Larmy and the reporter would meet at the office and dive into things too deep for Horatio's philosophy.

Their favourite theme was the immortality of the soul, and when they were on this theme David would get nervous, pace up and down the office, and finally throw himself on the lounge and begin to yawn. Whereupon a control, or state of mind, or personality that called itself Fra Guiseppi would rise to consciousness and dominate the boy. Larmy and the reporter called it "father," and talked to it with considerable jocularity, considering that the father claimed they were talking to a ghost. It would do odd things for them; go into rooms where David had never been: describe their furnishings and occupants accurately; read the numbers on watches of prominent citizens, which the reporter would verify the next day; and pretend to bring other departed spirits into the room to discuss various matters. Larmy had a pleasant social chat with Karl Marx, and had the spirits hunting all over the kingdom-come for Tom Paine and Murat. But the messenger either could not find them, or the line was busy with someone else, so these worthies never appeared.

Still, this must be said of the "father," that it had a philosophy of life, and a distinct personality far deeper and more charming and in some way sweeter than David's; that it talked with an accent, which to the hearers seemed Italian, and in a voice that certainly could not have been the boy's by any trick of ventriloquism. One night in their talks Larmy said:

"'Father,' you say you believe that the judgments of God are just—how do you account for the sufferings, the heartaches, the sorrows, the misery that come in the wake of those judgments? Here is a great railway accident that strikes down twenty people, renders some cripples for life, kills others. Here is a flood that sweeps away the property of good men and bad men. Is that just? What compensation is there for it?"

The "father" put his chin in one hand and remained silent for a time, as one deep in thought; then he replied:

"That is—what you call—life. That is what makes life, life; what makes it different from the existence we know now. All your misfortunes, your hardships, your joys, all your miseries and failures and triumphs—these are the school of the soul which you call life. It is a preparation for the hereafter."

And David waking knew nothing of the thing that possessed him sleeping. When they told him, he would smoke his cigarette, and make reply that he must have had 'em pretty bad this time, or that he was glad he wasn't that "buggy" when he was awake.

David's talent soon became known in the office. We used to call it his spook, but only once did we harness it to practical business and that was when old Charley Hedrick, the local boss, was picking a candidate for the Legislature. The reporter and Larmy asked the "father" one night if it could get us connected with Mr. Hedrick. It said it would try; it needed help. And there appeared another personality with which they were more or less familiar, called the Jew. The Jew claimed to be a literary man, and said it would act as receiver while the father acted as transmitter on Hedrick. Then they got this one-sided telephonic conversation in a thick, wheezy voice that was astonishingly like Hedrick's:

"Harmony—hell, yes; we're always getting the harmony and the Worthington state bank gets the offices." Then a pause ensued. "Well, let'em bolt. I'm getting tired of giving up the whole county ticket to them fellows to keep 'em from bolting." After another pause, he seemed to answer someone: "Oh, Bill?—you can't trust him! He's played both sides in this town for ten years. What I want isn't a man to satisfy them, but just this once I want a man who won't be even under the suspicion of satisfying them. I want a fellow to satisfy me." The other side of the telephone must have spoken, for this came: "Well, then, we'll bust their damn bank! Did you see their last statement: cash down to fifteen per cent. and no dividends on half a million assets for a year and a half? Something's rotten there. They're a lot of 'toads in a poisoned tank,' as old Browning says. If they want a fight, they can have it." After the silence he replied: "I tell you fellows they can't afford a fight. And, anyway, there'll never be peace in this town till we get things on the basis of one bank, one newspaper, one wife and one country, and the way to do that is to get out in the open and fight. If I've got as much sense as a rabbit I say that Ab Handy is the man, and whether I'm right or wrong I'm going to run him." He seemed to retort to some objector: "Yes, and the first thing you know he'd come charging up to the Speaker's desk with a maximum freight-rate bill, or a stock-yards bill—and where would I be? I tell you he won't stand hitched. He'll swell up like a pizened pup, and you couldn't handle him. Where'd any of us be, if the Representative from this county got to pawing the air for reform? I know Jake as though I'd been through him with a lantern." There must have been a discussion of some kind among the others, for a lengthy interim followed; then the voice continued: "Elect him?—of course we can elect him. I can get five hundred from the State Committee and we can raise that much down here. This is a Republican year, and we could elect Judas Iscariot against any of the eleven brethren this year on the Republican ticket, and I tell you it's Ab. You fellows can do as you please, but I'm going to run Ab."

Then, being full of political curiosity rather than impelled by a desire for psychological research, the reporter slipped out and waited in a stairway opposite the Exchange National Bank building until the light in Hedrick's law office was extinguished. Then he saw old Charley and his henchmen come out, one at a time, look cautiously up and down the street and go forth in different, devious ways. The story in our paper the next day of the candidacy of Ab Handy threw consternation into the ranks of the enemy. We had printed the conversation as it had occurred, after which five men publicly contended that one of their number was a traitor.

The summer browned the pastures, and the coming of autumn brought trouble for David Lewis, president of the Imperial Dancing Club, short-stop for the Maroons, snare-drummer in the band, and operator of linotypes. We who are at the period of life where love is a harvest forget the days of the harrow, and are prone to smile at the season of the seeding. We do not know that the heaviest burden God puts on a young soul is a burden of the heart. A travelling silk-salesman, with a haughty manner and a two-hundred-dollar job, saw the blonde in the Racket Store and began calling at her father's home like the captain of an army with banners. David, being only an armour-bearer at fifteen dollars a week, found heartbreak in it all for him. A girl of twenty is so much older than a boy of twenty-one that the blonde began to assume a maternal attitude toward the boy, and he took to walking afield on Sundays, looking at the sky in agony and asking his little "now-I-lay-me" God, what life was given to him for. He fabricated a legend that she was selling herself for gold, and when the haughty manner and the blonde sped by David's window behind jingling sleigh-bells that winter, David, sitting at the machine, got back proofs from the front office that looked like war-maps of a strange country. Moreover he let his matrices go uncleaned until they were beardy as wheat and the bill of repairs on the machine had begun to rise like a cat's back.

All of this may seem funny in the telling, but to see the little Welshman's heart breaking in him was no pleasant matter. The girls in the office pitied the boy, and hoped the silk-drummer would break her heart. The town and the Imperial Club, whereof David was much beloved, took sides with him, and knew his sorrow for their own. As for the blonde, it was only nature asserting itself in her; so David got back his little chip diamonds, and his bangle bracelet, and his copy of "Riley's Love Songs," and there was the "mist and the blinding rain" for him, and the snow of winter hardened on the sidewalks.

To console himself, the boy traded for a music-box, which he set going with a long brass lever. Its various tunes were picked in holes on circular steel sheets, which were fed into the box and set whirling with the lever. At night when Larmy wasn't enjoying what David called a spook-fest, the boy would sit in the office by the hour and listen to his music-box. He must have played "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" a hundred lonesome times that winter (it had been their favourite waltz—his and the girl's—at the Imperial Club), and it was a safe guess that if the boys in the office, as they passed the box at noon, would give the lever a yank, from the abdomen of the contrivance the waltz song would begin deep and low to rumble and swell out with all the simulation of sorrow that a mechanical soul may express.

As the winter deepened, Larmy and the reporter and the "father" had more and more converse. The "father" explained a theory of immortality which did not interest the reporter, but which Larmy heard eagerly. It said that science would resolve matter into mere forms of motion, which are expressions of divine will, and that the only place where this divine will exists in its pure state, eluding the so-called material state, is in the human soul. Further, the "father" explained that this soul, or divine will, exists without the brain, independent of brain tissue, as may be proved by the accepted phenomena of hypnotism, where the soul is commanded to leave the body and see and hear and feel and know things which the mere physical organs can not experience, owing to the interposition of space. The "father" said that at death the Divine Will commands the ripened seed of life to leave the body and assume immortality, just as that Will commands the seeds of plants and the sperm of animals to assume their natural functions. The Thing that talked through David's lips said that the body is the seed-pod of the soul, and that souls grow little or much as they are planted and environed and nurtured by life. All this it said in many nights, while Larmy wondered and the reporter scoffed and stuck pins in David to see if he could feel them. And the boy wakened from his dreams always to say: "Gimme a cigarette!" and to reach over and pull the lever of his music-box, and add: "Perfessor, give us a tune! Hen, the professor says he won't play unless you give me a cigarette for him."

One night, after a long wrangle which ended in a discourse by the "father," a strange thing happened. Larmy and It were contending as to whether It was merely a hypnotic influence on the boy, of someone living whom they did not know, or what It claimed to be, a disembodied spirit. By way of diversion, the reporter had just run a binder's needle under one of the boy's finger-nails to see whether he would flinch. Then the Voice that was coming from David's mouth spoke and said: "I will show you something to prove it;" and the entranced boy rose and went to the back room, while the two others followed him.

He turned the lever that flashed the light on his linotype, and set the little motor going. He lifted up the lid of the metal-pot, to see if the fire was keeping it molten. Then the boy sat at the machine with his hands folded in his lap, gazing at the empty copy-holder out of dead eyes. In a minute—perhaps it was a little longer—a brass matrix slipped from the magazine and clicked down into the assembler; in a second or two another fell, and then, very slowly, like the ticks of a great clock, the brasses slipped—slipped—slipped into their places, and the steel spaces dropped into theirs. A line was formed, while the boy's hands lay in his lap. When it was a full line he grabbed the lever, that sent the line over to the metal-pot to be cast, and his hand fell back in his lap, while the dripping of the brasses continued and the blue and white keys on the board sank and rose, although no finger touched them.

Larmy squinted at the thing, and held his long, fuzzy, unshaven chin in his hand. When the second line was cast the reporter broke the silence with: "Well, I'll be damned!" And the Voice from David's mouth replied: "Very likely." And the clicking of the brasses grew quicker.

Seven lines were cast and then the boy got up and went back to the couch in the front room, where he yawned himself, apparently, through three strata of consciousness, into his normal self. They took a proof of what had been cast, but it was in Latin and they could not translate it. David himself forgot about it the next day, but the reporter, being impressed and curious, took the proof to the teacher of Latin at the college, who translated it thus: "He shall go away on a long journey across the ocean, and he shall not return, yet the whole town shall see him again and know him—and he shall bring back the song that is in his heart, and you shall hear it."

The next week the "Maine" was blown up, and in the excitement the troubles of David were forgotten in the office. Moreover, as he had to work overtime he put his soul deeper into the machine, and his nerves took on something of the steel in which he lived. The Associated Press report was long in those days, and the paper was filled with local news of wars and rumours of wars, so that when the call for troops came in the early spring, the town was eager for it, and David could not wait for the local company to form, but went to Lawrence and enlisted with the Twentieth Kansas. He was our first war-hero for thirty years, and the town was proud of him. Most of the town knew why he went, and there was reproach for the blonde in the Racket Store, who had told the girls it would be in June and that they were going East for a wedding trip.

When David came back from Lawrence an enlisted man, with a week in which to prepare for the fray, the Imperial Club gave him a farewell dance of great pride, in that one end of Imperial Hall was decorated for the occasion with all the Turkish rugs, and palms, and ferns, and piano-lamps with red shades, and American flags draped from the electric fixtures, and all the cut-glass and hand-painted punch-bowls that the girls of the T. T. T. Club could beg or borrow; and red lemonade and raspberry sherbet flowed like water. Whereat David Lewis was so pleased that he grew tearful when he came into the hall and saw the splendour that had been made for him. But his soul, despite his gratitude to the boys and girls who gave the party, was filled with an unutterable sadness; and he sat out many dances under the red lamp-shades with the various girls who had been playing sister to him; and the boys to whom the girls were more than sisters were not jealous.

As for the blonde, she beamed and preened and smiled on David, but her name was not on his card, and as the silk-salesman was on the road, she had many vacant lines on her programme, and she often sat alone by a card-table shuffling the deck that lay there. The boy's eyes were dead when they looked at her and her smile did not coax him to her. Once when the others were dancing an extra David sat across the room from her, and she went to him and sat by him, and said under the music:

"I thought we were always going to be friends—David?" And after he had parried her for a while, he rose to go away, and she said: "Won't you dance just once with me, Dave, just for old sake's sake before you go?" And he put down his name for the next extra and thought of how long it had been since the last June dance. Old sake's sake with youth may mean something that happened only day before yesterday.

The boy did not speak to his partner during the next dance but went about debating something in his mind; and when the number was ended he tripped over to the leader of the orchestra, whom he had hired for dances a score of times, and asked for "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" as the next "extra." It was his waltz and he didn't care if the whole town knew it—they would dance it together. And so when the orchestra began he started away, a very heart-broken, brown-eyed, olive-skinned little Welshman, who barely touched the finger-tips of a radiant, overdeveloped blonde with roses in her cheeks and moonlight in her hair. She would have come closer to him but he danced away and only hunted for her soul with his brown Celtic eyes. And because David had asked for it and they loved the boy, the old men in the orchestra played the waltz over and over again, and at the end the dancers clapped their hands for an encore, and when the chorus began they sang it dancing, and the boy found the voice which cheered the "Men of Harlech," the sweet, cadent voice of his race, and let out his heart in the words.

When he led her to a seat, the blonde had tears on her eyelashes as she choked a "good-by, Dave" to him, but he turned away without answering her and went to find his next partner. It was growing late and the crowd soon went down the long, dark stairway leading from Imperial Hall, into the moonlight and down the street, singing and humming and whistling "Love's Golden Dream," and the next day they and the town and the band came down to the noon train to see the conquering hero go.

It was lonesome in the office after David went, and his music-box in the corner was dumb, for we couldn't find the brass lever for it, though the printers and the reporters hunted in his trunk and in every place they could think of. But the lonesomest things in the world for him were the machines. The big press grew sulky and kept breaking the web, and his linotype took to absorbing castor-oil as if it were a kind of hasheesh. The new operator could run the new machine, but David's seemed to resent familiarity. It was six months before we got things going straight after he left us.

He wrote us soldier letters from the Presidio, and from mid-ocean, and from the picket-line in front of Manila. One afternoon the messenger-boy came in snuffling with a sheet of the Press-report. David's name was among the killed. Then we turned the column rules on the first page and got out the paper early to give the town the news. Henry Larmy brought in an obituary, the next day, which needed much editing, and we printed it under the head "A Tribute from a Friend," and signed Larmy's name to it.

The boy had no kith or kin—which is most unusual for a Welshman—and so, except in our office, he seemed to be forgotten. A month went by, the season changed, and changed again, and a year was gone, when the Government sent word to Larmy—whom the boy seemed to have named for his next friend—that David's body would be brought back for burial if his friends desired it. So in the fall of 1900, when the Presidential campaign was at its height, the conquering hero came home, and we gave him a military funeral. The body came to us on Labor Day, and in our office we consecrated the day to David. The band and the militia company took him from the big stone church where sometimes he had gone to Sunday-school as a child, and a long procession of townsfolk wound around the hill to the cemetery, where David received a salute of guns, and the bugler played taps, and our eyes grew wet and our hearts were touched. Then we covered him with flowers, whipped up the horses and came back to the world.

That night, as it was at the end of a holiday, the Republican Committee had assigned to our town, for the benefit of the men in the shops, one of the picture-shows that Mark Hanna, like a heathen in his blindness, had sent to Kansas, thinking our State, after the war, needed a spur to its patriotism in the election. The crowd in front of the post-office was a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet long, looking at the pictures from the kinetoscope—pictures of men going to work in mills and factories; pictures of the troops unloading on the coast of Cuba; pictures of the big warships sailing by; pictures of Dewey's flagship coming up the Hudson to its glory; pictures of the Spanish ships lying crushed in Manila harbour.

Larmy and the reporter were sitting kicking their heels on the stone steps of the post-office opposite the screen on which the pictures were flickering. Some they saw and others they did not notice, for their talk was of David and of the strange things he had shown to them.

"How did you ever fix it up in your mind?" asked Larmy.

"I didn't fix it up. He was too many for me," was the reporter's answer.

"The little rooster couldn't have faked it up?" questioned Larmy.

"No—but he might have hypnotised us—or something."

"Yes—but still, he might have been hypnotised by something himself," suggested Larmy, and then added: "That thing he did with the linotype—say, wasn't that about the limit? And yet nothing has come of that prophecy. That's the trouble. I've seen dozens of those things, and they always just come up to the edge of proving themselves, but always jump back. There is always——"

"My God, Larmy, look—look!" cried the reporter.

And the two men looked at the screen before them, just as the backward sway of the crowd had ceased and horror was finding a gasping voice upon the lips of the women; for there, walking as naturally as life, out of the background of the picture, came David Lewis with his dark sleeves rolled up, his peaked army hat on the back of his head, a bucket in his hand, and as he stopped and grinned at the crowd—between the lightning-flashes of the kinetoscope—they could see him wave his free hand. He stood there while a laugh covered his features, and he put his hand in his pocket and drew out a key-ring, which he waved, holding it by some long, stemlike instrument. Then he snapped back into nothing.

And the operator of the machine, being in a hurry to catch the ten-thirty train, went on with his picture-show and gave us President McKinley and Mark Hanna sitting on the front steps of the home in Canton, then followed the photograph of the party around the big table signing the treaty of peace. As the crowd loosened and dissolved, Larmy and the reporter stood silently waiting. Then, when they could get away together, the reporter said:

"Come, let's go over to the shop and think about this thing."

When they opened the office door, the rank odour of the machinery came to them with sickening force. They left the front door open and raised the windows. The reporter began using a chisel on the top of a little box with a Government frank on it, that had been placed upon the music-box in the corner.

"We may as well see what David sent home," he grunted, as he jerked at the stubborn nails, "anyway, I've got a theory."

Larmy was smoking hard. "Yes," he replied after a time; "we might as well open it now as any time. The letter said all his things would be found there. I guess he didn't have a great deal. Poor little devil, there was no one much to get things for but you fellows and maybe me, if he thought of us."

By this time the box was opened, and the reporter was scooping things out upon the floor. There was an army uniform, that had something clinky in the pockets, and wrapped in a magenta silk handkerchief was a carved piece of ivory. In a camera plate-box was a rose, faded and crumbly, a chip-diamond ring, a bangle bracelet, a woman's glove and a photograph. These Larmy looked at as he smoked. They meant nothing to him, but the reporter dived into the clothes for the clinky things. He came up with a bunch of keys, and on it was the long brass lever which unlocked the music in the box.

"Here," he said as he jingled the keys, "is the last link in our chain." And he rose and went over to the box, uncovered it, and jabbed in the lever with a nervous hand. There was a rolling and clinking inside. Then, slowly, a harmony rose, and the tinkling that came from the box resolved itself into a melody that filled the room. It was strong and clear and powerful, and seemed to have a certain passion in it that may have been struck like flint fire from the time and the place and the spirit of the occasion. The two men stared dumbly as they listened. The sound rose stronger and stronger; over and over again the song repeated itself; then very gently its strength began to fail; and finally it sank into a ghostly tinkle that still carried the melody till it faded into silence.

"That," said the reporter, "is the song that was in his heart—'Love's Golden Dream.' I'm satisfied."

"The last link," shuddered Larmy. "That which seemed corporeal has melted 'as a breath into the wind.'"

The reporter shovelled the debris into the box, pushed it under a desk, and the two men hurried to close the office. As they stood on the threshold a moment, while the reporter clicked the key in the lock, a paper rustled and they heard a mouse scamper across the floor inside the empty room.

"Let's go home," shivered Larmy. They started north, which was the short way home, but Larmy took hold of his companion's arm and said: "No, let's go this way: there's an electric light here on the corner, and it's dark down there."

And so they turned into the white, sputtering glare and walked on without words.

V

The Coming of the Leisure Class

We all are workers in our town, as people are in every small town. It is always proper to ask what a man does for a living with us, for none of us has money enough to live without work, and until the advent of Beverly Amidon, our leisure class consisted of Red Martin, the gambler, the only man in town with nothing to do in the middle of the day; and the black boys who loafed on the south side of the bank building through the long afternoons until it was time to deliver the clothes which their wives and mothers had washed. Everyone else in town works, and, excepting an occasional picnic, there is no social activity among the men until after sundown. But five years ago Beverly Amidon came to town, and brought with him a large leisure and a taste for society which made him easily the "glass of fashion and the mould of form" not only in our little community, but all over this part of the State. Beverly and his mother, who had come to make their home with her sister, in one of the big houses on the hill, had money. How much, we had no idea. In a small town when one has "money" no one knows just how much or how little, but it must be over fifteen thousand dollars, otherwise one is merely "well fixed."

And brought with him a large leisure and a taste for society

But Beverly was a blessing to our office. We never could have filled the society column Saturday without him, for he was a continuous social performance. He was the first man in town who dared to wear a flannel tennis suit on the streets, and he was a whole year ahead of the other boys with his Panama hat. It was one of those broad-brimmed Panamas, full of heart-interest, that made him look like a romantic barytone, and when under that gala façade he came tripping into the office in his white duck clothes, with a wide Windsor tie, Miss Larrabee, the society editor, who was the only one of us with whom he ever had any business, would pull the string that unhooked the latch of the gate to her section of the room and say, without looking up: "Come into the garden, Maud." To which he made invariable reply: "Oh, Miss Larrabee, don't be so sarcastic! I have a little item for you."

The little item was always an account of one of his social triumphs. And there was a long list of them to his credit. He introduced ping-pong; he gave us our first "pit party"; he held the first barn dance given in the county; his was our first "tacky party"; and he gave the first progressive buggy ride the young people had ever enjoyed, and seven girls afterward confessed that on the evening of that affair he hadn't been in the buggy with them five minutes before he began driving with one hand—and his right hand at that. Still, when the crowd assembled for supper at Flat Rock, the girls didn't hold his left handiwork against him, and they admitted that he was just killing when he put on one of their hats and gave an imitation of a girl from Bethany College who had been visiting in town the week before. Beverly was always the life of the company. He could make three kinds of salad dressing, two kinds of lobster Newburgh and four Welsh rarebits, and was often the sole guest of honour at the afternoon meetings of the T. T. T. girls, before whom he was always willing to show his prowess. Sometimes he gave chafing-dish parties whereat he served ginger ale and was real devilish.

He used to ride around the country bare-headed with two or three girls when honest men were at work, and he acquired a fine leather-coloured tan. He tried organising a polo club, but the ponies from the delivery waggons that were available after six o'clock did not take training well, and he gave up polo. In making horse-back riding a social diversion he taught a lot of fine old family buggy horses a number of mincing steps, so that thereafter they were impossible in the family phaeton. He thereby became unpopular with a number of the heads of families, and he had to introduce bridge whist in the old married set to regain their favour. This cost him the goodwill of the preachers, and he gave a Japanese garden party for the Epworth League to restore himself in the church where he was accustomed to pass the plate on Sundays. Miss Larrabee used to call him the first aid to the ennuied. But the Young Prince, who chased runaways teams and wrote personal items, never referred to him except as "Queen of the Hand-holders." For fun we once printed Beverly Amidon's name among those present at a Mothers' League meeting, and it was almost as much of a hit in the town as the time we put the words, "light refreshments were served and the evening was spent in cards and dancing," at the close of an account of a social meeting of the Ministerial Alliance.

The next time Beverly brought in his little item he stopped long enough to tell us that he thought that the people who laughed at our obvious mistake in the list of guests of the Mothers' League were rather coarse. One word brought on two, and as it was late in the afternoon, and the paper was out, we bade Beverly sit down and tell us the story of his life, and his real name; for Miss Larrabee had declared a dozen times that Beverly Amidon sounded so much like a stage name that she was willing to bet that his real name was Jabez Skaggs.

Beverly's greatest joy was in talking about his social conquests in Tiffin, Ohio; therefore he soon was telling us that there was so much culture in Tiffin, such a jolly lot of girls, so many pleasant homes, and a most extraordinary atmosphere of refinement. He rattled along, telling us what great sport they used to have running down to Cleveland for theatre-parties, and how easy it was to 'phone to Toledo and get the nicest crowd of boys one could wish to come over to the parties, and how Tiffin was famous all over that part of Ohio for its exclusive families and its week-end house-parties.

The Young Prince sat by listening for a time and then got up and leaned over the railing around Miss Larrabee's desk. Beverly was confiding to us how he got up the sweetest living pictures you ever saw and took them down to Cleveland, where they made all kinds of money for the King's Daughters. He told what gorgeous costumes the girls wore and what stunning backgrounds he rigged up. The Young Prince winked at Miss Larrabee as he straightened up and started for the door. Then he let fly: "Were you Psyche at the Pool in that show, or a Mellin's Food Baby?"

But Beverly deigned no reply and a little later in the conversation remarked that the young men in this town were very bad form. He thought that he had seen some who were certainly not gentlemen. He really didn't see how the young ladies could endure to have such persons in their set. He confided to Miss Larrabee that at a recent lawn-party he had come upon a young man, who should be nameless, with his arm about a young woman's waist.

"And, Miss Larrabee," continued Beverly in his solemnest tones, "A young man who will put his arm around a girl will go further—yes, Miss Larabee—much further. He will kiss her!" Whereat he nodded his head and shook it at the awful thought.

Miss Larrabee drew in a shocked breath and gasped:

"Do you really think so, Mr. Amidon? I couldn't imagine such a thing!"

He had a most bedizened college fraternity pin, which he was forever lending to the girls. During his first year in town, Miss Larrabee told us, at least a dozen girls had worn the thing. Wherefore she used to call it the Amidon Loan Exhibit.

He introduced golf into our town, and was able to find six men to join his fifteen young ladies in the ancient sport. Two preachers, a young dentist and three college professors were the only male creatures who dared walk across our town in plaid stockings and knickerbockers, and certainly it hurt their standing at the banks, for the town frowned on golf, and confined its sport to baseball in the summer, football in the autumn, and checkers in the winter.

That was a year ago. In the autumn something happened to Beverly, and he had to go to work. There was nothing in our little town for him, so he went to Kansas City. He did not seem to "make it" socially there, for he wrote to the girls that Kansas City was cold and distant and that everything was ruled by money. He explained that there were some nice people, but they did not belong to the fast set. He was positively shocked, he wrote, at what he heard of the doings at the Country Club—so different from the way things went in Tiffin, Ohio.

For a long time we did not hear his name mentioned in the office. Finally there came a letter addressed to Miss Larrabee. In it Beverly said that he had found his affinity. "She is not rich," he admitted, "but," he added, "she belongs to an old, aristocratic, Southern family, through reduced circumstances living in retirement; very exclusive, very haughty. I have counted it a privilege to be constantly associated with people of such rare distinction. Her mother is a grand dame of the old school who has opened her home to a few choice paid guests who feel, as I do, that it is far more refreshing socially to partake of the gracious hospitality of her secluded home than to live in the noisy, vulgar hotels of the city. It was in this relation at her mother's home that I met the woman who is to join her lot with mine." Thereafter followed the date and place of the wedding, a description of the bride's dress, an account of her lineage back to the "Revolutionary Georgia Governor of that name," and fifty cents in stamps for extra papers containing an account of the wedding.

In time we hope to teach our young men to roll down their shirt-sleeves in the summer, our girls to wear their hats, our horses to quit prancing in the shafts of the family buggy. In time bridge whist will wear itself out, in time our social life will resume its old estate, and the owners of the five dress-suits in town will return to their former distinction. In time caste lines set by the advent of the leisure class will be obliterated, and it will be no longer bad form for the dry-goods clerk to dance with the grocery clerk's wife at the Charity Ball. But, come what may, we shall always know that there was a time in the social history of our town when we danced the two-step as they dance it in Tiffin, Ohio, and wore knee-breeches and plaid stockings, and quit work at four o'clock. Those were great days—"the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome."

VI

The Bolton Girl's "Position"

When she said she would like to "accept a position" with our paper, it was all over between us. After that we knew that she was at least highly improbable if not entirely impossible. But then we might have expected as much from a girl who called herself Maybelle. There is, however, this much to be said in Maybelle's favour: she was persistent. She did not let go till it thundered! We could have stood it well enough if she had limited her campaign for a job on the paper to an occasional call at the office. But she had a fiendish instinct which told her who were the friends we liked most to oblige: the banker, for instance, who carried our overdrafts, the leading advertiser, the chairman of the printing committee of the town council—and she found ways to make them ask if we couldn't do something for Miss Bolton. She could teach school; indeed, she had a place in the Academy. But she loathed school-teaching. She had always felt that, if she could once get a start, she could make a name for herself.

She had written something that she called "A Critique on Hamlet," which she submitted to us, and was deeply pained when we told her that we didn't care for editorial matter; that what our paper needed was the names of the people in our own country town and county, printed as many times a day or a week or a month as they could be put into type. We tried to tell her that more important to us than the influence of the Celtic element on our national life and literature was the fact that John Jones of Lebo—that is to say, red John, as distinguished from black John—or Jones the tinner, or Jones of the Possum Holler settlement was in town with a load of hay. "Other papers," we explained carefully, while she looked as sympathetic and intelligent as a collie, "other papers might be interested in the radio-activity of uranium X; they might care to print articles on the psychological phenomena of mobs"—to which she snapped eager agreement with her eyes—"others, with entire propriety, might be interested in inorganic evolution"—and she cheeped "yes, yes" with feverish intensity—"but in our little local paper we cared only for the person who could tell our readers with the most delicacy and precision how many spoons Mrs. Worthington had to borrow for her party, who had the largest number of finger-bowls in town, what Mrs. Conklin paid for the broilers she served at her party last February, and the name of the country woman who raised them, and why it was that all the women failed to make Jennie's recipe for sunshine cake work when they tried it." Such are the things that interest our people, and he, she or it who can turn in two or three columns a day of items setting forth these things in a good-natured way, so that the persons mentioned will only grin and wonder who told it, is good for ten dollars of our money every Saturday night.

Maybelle thought it was such interesting work, and her eyes floated in tears of happiness at the thought of such joy. If she could only have a chance! It would be just lovely—simply grand, and she knew she could do it! Something in her innermost soul thrilled with a tintinabulation that made her quiver with anticipation. Whereupon she went out and came back in three days with five sheets of foolscap on which she had written an article beginning: "When Memory draws aside the curtains of her magic chamber, revealing the pictures meditation paints, and we see through the windows of our dreams the sweet vale of yesterday, lying outside and beyond; when stern Ambition, with relentless hand, turns us away from all this to ride in the sombre chariot of Duty—then it is that entrancing Pleasure beckons us back to sit by Memory's fire and sip our tea with Maiden meditation." What it was all about no one ever found out; but the Young Prince at the local desk who read it clear through said that sometimes he thought that it was a report of a fire and at other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue. It would have made four columns. As he put the roll back in the drawer the Young Prince rose and paced grandly out. At the front door he stopped and said: "You'll never make anything out of her—she's a handholder! When a girl begins to get corns on her hands, I notice she has mush on the brain!"

Sometimes he thought it was a report of a fire and at other times it seemed like a dress-goods catalogue

But Maybelle returned, and we went all over the same ground again. We explained that what we wanted was short items—two or three lines each—little references to home doings; something telling who has company, who is sick, who is putting shingles on the barn or an "L" on the house. And she said "Oh, yes!" so passionately that it seemed as though she would bark or put her front feet on the table. One felt like taking her jaws in his hands and pulling her ears.

The next time she came in she said that if we would just try her—give her something to do—she was sure she could show us how well she could do it. On a venture, and partly to get rid of her, we sent her to the district convention of the Epworth League to write up the opening meeting. About noon of the next day she brought in three sermons, and said that she didn't get the list of officers nor the names of the choir because they were all people who lived here and everyone knew them. Then we explained in short, simple sentences that the sermons were of no value, and that the names were what we desired. She dropped her eyes and said meekly "Oh!" and told us how sorry she was. Also she said that if it wasn't for a meeting of the T. T. T. girls that afternoon she would go back and get the names. When she went out, the Young Prince, sitting by the window with his pencil behind his ear and his feet on the table, said: "I bet she can make the grandest fudge!" "And such lovely angel food," put in Miss Larrabee, who was busy writing up the Epworth League convention.

Miss Bolton's name was always among the lists we printed of the guests at the Entre Nous Card Club, the Imperial Dancing Club, the "Giddy Young Things" Club, the Art Club and the Shakespeare Club. But when she came to the office she was full of anxiety at the frivolity of society. She said that she so longed for intellectual companionship that she felt sometimes as if she must fly to a place where she could find a soul that would feel in unison with the infinite that thrilled her being. Far be it from her to wish to coin the pulsations of her soul, but papa and mamma did need her help so. She accented papa and mamma on the last syllable and leaned forward and looked upward like a shirtwaist Madonna. But writing locals someway didn't appeal to her. She wondered if we could use a serial story. And then she went on: "Oh, I have some of the sweetest things in my head! I know I could write them. They just tingle through my blood like wine. I know I could write them—such sublime things—but when I sit down to put them on paper something always comes up that prevents my going on with them. There are dozens whirling through my brain begging to be written. There is one about the earl who has imprisoned the young princess in a dungeon, and her lover, a knight of the cross, comes home from a crusade and is put in the cell next to her. A bird that she has been feeding through her prison window takes a lock of her golden hair to the window where her lover is looking out across the beautiful world, not knowing that she, too, has fallen into the earl's clutches. And, oh, yes! there is another about Cornelia who lived in a moated tower, and all the dukes and lords and kings in the land had laid suit to her hand, and she could find none who came up to her highest ideal, so she set them a task—and, oh, a lot more about what they did; I haven't thought that out—but anyway she married the red duke Wolfang who spurned her task and took her by night with his retainers away from the tower, saying her love was his Holy Grail and to get her was the object of his pilgrimage. Oh, it's just grand."

No, we don't use serials and when we do we buy them in stereotyped plates by the pound. This made Miss Bolton droop, with another disappointed "Oh." The grain of the world seems so coarse when one looks at it closely.

We did not see Miss Bolton at the office for a long time after the duke abducted the lady in the moated grange, but we received a poem signed M. B. "To Dan Cupid," and another on "My Heart of Fire." Also there came an anonymous communication in strangely familiar fat vertical handwriting to the effect that "some people in this town think that if a young lady has a gentleman friend call on her more than twice a week it is their business to assume a courtship. They should know that there are souls on this earth whose tendrils reach into the infinite beyond the gross materiality of this mundane sphere to a destiny beyond the stars." At the bottom of the page were the words: "Please publish and oblige a subscriber."

The next that we heard of Miss Bolton was that she was running pink and blue baby-ribbon through her white things, and was expecting a linen shower from the T. T. T. girls, a silver shower from the "Giddy Young Things," a handkerchief shower from the Entre Nous girls, and a kitchen shower from the Imperial Club. Miss Larrabee, the society editor, began to hate Miss Bolton with the white-hot hate which all society editors turn on all brides. Miss Larrabee was authority for the statement that Maybelle had used five hundred yards of baby-ribbon—pink and blue and white and yellow—in her trousseau, and that she was bestowing the same passionate fervour on her hemstitching and tucking that she had wasted on literature; that she was helping papa and mamma by shouldering the biggest wedding on them since the Tomlinsons went into bankruptcy after their firework ceremonial. Miss Larrabee said that Papa Bolton's livery-stable was burning up so fast that she wanted to call out the fire department, and that Mamma Bolton made her think of the patent-medicine testimonials we printed from "poor tired women."

The day of the wedding the blow came. A very starched-up little boy with strawberry juice frescoed around his mouth brought in a note from Maybelle and a tightly-rolled manuscript tied with blue baby-ribbon. In the note she said that she thought it would be so romantic to "write up her own wedding—recalling the dear, dead days when she was a neophyte in letters." We handed the manuscript to Miss Larrabee, from whom, as she read, came snorts: "'Drawing-room!' Huh! 'Music-room.' Heavens to Betsy! 'Peculiar style of beauty!' Oh, joy! 'Looked like a wood-nymph in the morn.' Wouldn't that saturate you! 'The Apollo-like beauty of the groom.'" Miss Larrabee groaned as she rose, and putting her raincoat on the floor by her chair she exclaimed: "Do you people know what I am going to do? I have got to lie right down here and have a fit!"

VII

"By the Rod of His Wrath"

Saturday afternoons, when the town is full, and farmers are coming in to the office to pay their subscriptions for the Weekly, it is our habit, after the paper is out, to sit in the office and look over Main Street, where perhaps five hundred people are milling, and consider with one another the nature of our particular little can of angle-worms and its relation to the great forces that move the world. The town often seems to us to be dismembered from the earth, and to be a chunk of humanity drifting through space by itself, like a vagrant star, forgotten of the law that governs the universe. Go where our people will, they find change; but when they come home, they look out of the hack as they ride through town, seeing the old familiar buildings and bill-boards and street-signs, and say with surprise, as Mathew Boris said after a busy and eventful day in Kansas City, where he had been marketing his steers: "Well, the old town seems to keep right on, just the same."

The old men in town seem always to have been old, and though the middle-aged do sometimes step across the old-age line, the young men remain perennially young, and when they grow fat or dry up, and their hair thins and whitens, they are still called by their diminutive names, and to most of us they are known as sons of the old men. Here a new house goes up, and there a new store is built, but they rise slowly, and everyone in town has time to go through them and over them and criticise the architectural taste of the builders, so that by the time a building is finished it seems to have grown into the original consciousness of the people, and to be a part of their earliest memories. We send our children to Sunday-school, and we go to church and learn how God's rewards or punishments fell upon the men of old, as they were faithful or recreant; but we don't seem to be like the men of old, for we are neither very good nor very bad—hardly worth God's while to sort us over for any uncommon lot. Only once, in the case of John Markley, did the Lord reach into our town and show His righteous judgment. And that judgment was shown so clearly through the hearts of our people that very likely John Markley does not consider it the judgment of God at all, but the prejudice of the neighbours.

When we have been talking over the case of John Markley in the office we have generally ended by wondering whether God—or whatever one cares to call the force that operates the moral laws, as well as those that in our ignorance we set apart as the physical laws of the world—whether God moves by cataclysm and accidents, or whether He moves with blessing or chastisement, through human nature as it is, in the ordinary business of the lives of men. But we have never settled that in our office any more than they have in the great schools, and as John Markley, game to the end, has never said what he thought of the town's treatment of him, it will never be known which side of our controversy is right.

Years ago, perhaps as long ago as the drought of seventy-four, men began calling him "Honest John Markley." He was the fairest man in town, and he made money by it, for when he opened his little bank Centennial year, which was the year of the big wheat crop, farmers stood in line half an hour at a time, at the door of his bank, waiting to give him their money. He was a plain, uncollared, short-whiskered man, brown-haired and grey-eyed, whose wife always made his shirts and, being a famous cook in town, kept him round and chubby. He referred to her as "Ma," and she called him "Pa Markley" so insistently that when we elected him State Senator, after he made his bank a National bank, in 1880, the town and county couldn't get used to calling him Senator Markley, so "Pa Markley" it was until after his Senatorial fame had been forgotten. Their children had grown up and left home before the boom of the eighties came—one girl went to California and the boy to South America;—and when John Markley began to write his wealth in six figures—which is almost beyond the dreams of avarice in a town like ours—he and his wife were lonely and knew little what to do with their income.

They bought new furniture for the parlour, and the Ladies' Missionary Society of the First Methodist Church, the only souls that saw it with the linen jackets off, say it was lovely to behold; they bought everything the fruit-tree man had in his catalogue, and their five acres on Exchange Street were pimpled over with shrubs that never bloomed and with trees that never bore fruit. He passed the hat in church—being a brother-in-law to the organisation, as he explained; sang "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching" at Grand Army entertainments, and always as an encore dragged "Ma" out to sing with him "Dear, Dear, What Can the Matter Be." She was a skinny, sharp-eyed, shy little woman in her late fifties when the trouble came. She rose at every annual meeting of the church to give a hundred dollars but her voice never lasted until she got through announcing her donation, and she sat down demurely, blushing and looking down her nose as though she had disgraced the family. She had lost a brother in the war, and never came further out of mourning than purple flowers in her bonnet. She bought John Markley's clothes, so that his Sunday finery contained nothing giddier than a grey made-up tie, that she pinned around the collars which her own hands had ironed.

Slowly as their fortune piled up, and people said they had a million, his brown beard grizzled a little, and his brow crept up and up and his girth stretched out to forty-four. But his hands did not whiten or soften, and though he was "Honest John," and every quarter-section of land that he bought doubled in value by some magic that he only seemed to know, he kept the habits of his youth, rose early, washed at the kitchen basin, and was the first man at his office in the morning. At night, after a hard day's work he smoked a cob-pipe in the basement, where he could spit into the furnace and watch the fire until nine o'clock, when he put out the cat and bedded down the fire, while "Ma" set the buckwheat cakes. They never had a servant in their house.

We used to see John Markley pass the office window a dozen times a day, a hale, vigorous man, whose heels clicked hard on the sidewalk as he came hurrying along—head back and shoulders rolling. He was a powerful, masculine, indomitable creature, who looked out of defiant, cold, unblinking eyes as though he were just about to tell the whole world to go to hell! The town was proud of him. He was our "prominent citizen," and when he was elected president of the district bankers' association, and his name appeared in the papers as a possible candidate for United States Senator or Minister to Mexico or Secretary of the Interior, we were glad that "Honest John Markley" was our fellow-townsman.

And then came the crash. Man is a curious creature, and, even if he is nine parts good, the old Adam in him must burn out one way or another in his youth, or there comes a danger period at the height of his middle life when his submerged tenth that has been smouldering for years flares up and destroys him. Wherefore the problem which we have never been able to solve, though we have talked it over in the office a dozen times: whether John Markley had begun to feel, before he met the Hobart woman, that he wasn't getting enough out of life for the money he had invested in it; or whether she put the notion in his head.

It is scarcely correct to speak of his having met her, for she grew up in the town, and had been working for the Markley Mortgage and Investment Company for half-a-dozen years before he began to notice her. From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music teaching and failed, china painting and failed, she learned stenography by sheer force of her own will, with no instruction save that in her book, and opened an office for such work as she could get, while aiming for the best job in town—the position of cashier and stenographer for the Markley Mortgage Company. It took her three years to get in and another year to make herself invaluable. She was big and strong, did the work of two men for the pay of one, and for five years John Markley, who saw that she had plenty of work to do, did not seem to know that she was on earth. But one day "Alphabetical" Morrison, who was in our office picking up his bundle of exchanges, looked rather idly out of the window, and suddenly rested his roving eyes upon John Markley and Mrs. Hobart, standing and talking in front of the post office. The man at the desk near Morrison happened to be looking out at that moment, and he, too, saw what Morrison saw—which was nothing at all, except a man standing beside a woman. Probably the pair had met in exactly the same place at exactly the same time, and had exchanged an idle word daily for five years! and no one had noticed it, but that day Morrison unconsciously put his hand to his chin and scratched his jaw, and his eyes and the man's at the desk beside him met in a surprised interrogation, and Morrison's mouth and nose twitched, and the other man said, as he turned his face into his work, "Well, wouldn't that get you!"

The conversation went no further. Neither could have said what he saw. But there is something in every human creature—a survival of our jungle days, which lets our eyes see more than our consciousness records in language. And these men, who saw Markley and the woman, could not have defined the canine impression which he gave them. Yet it was there. The volcano was beginning to smoke.

It was a month later before the town saw the flames. During that time John Markley had been walking to and from his midday dinner with Isabel Hobart, had been helping her on and off with her wraps in the office, and had been all but kicking up the dirt behind him and barking around her, as the clerks there told us, without causing comment. An honest man always has such a long start when he runs away from himself that no one misses him until he is beyond extradition. Matters went along thus for nearly a year before the woman in the cottage on Exchange Street knew how they stood. And that speaks well of our town; for we are not a mean town, and if anyone ever had our sympathy it was Mrs. Markley, as she went about her quiet ways, giving her missionary teas, looking after the poor of her church, making her famous doughnuts for the socials, doing her part at the Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, digging her club paper out of the encyclopædia, and making over her black silk the third time for every day. If John Markley was cross with her in that time—and the neighbours say that he was; if he sat for hours in the house without saying a word, and grumbled and flew into a rage at the least ruffling of the domestic waters—his wife kept her grief to herself, and even when she left town to visit her daughter in California no one knew what she knew.

A month passed, two months passed, and John Markley's name had become a by-word and a hissing. Three months passed, a year went by, and still the wife did not return. And then one day Ab Handy, who sometimes prepared John Markley's abstracts, came into our office and whispered to the man at the desk that there was a little paper filed in the court which, under the circumstances, Mr. Markley would rather we would say as little about as is consistent with our policy in such cases. Handy didn't say what it was, and backed out bowing and eating dirt, and we sent a boy hot-foot to the court-house to find out what had been filed. The boy came back with a copy of a petition for divorce that had been entered by John Markley, alleging desertion. John Markley did not face the town when he brought his suit, but left for Chicago on the afternoon train, and was gone nearly a month. The broken little woman did not come back to contest the case, and the divorce was granted.

The day before his marriage to Isabel Hobart, John Markley shaved off his grizzled brown beard, and showed the town a face so strong and cunning and brutal that men were shocked; they said that she wished to make him appear young, and the shave did drop ten years from his countenance; but it uncovered his soul so shamelessly that it seemed immodest to look at his face. Upon the return from the wedding trip, the employees of the Markley Mortgage Company, at John Markley's suggestion, gave a reception for the bride and groom, and the Lord laid the first visible stripe on John Markley while he stood with his bride for three hours, waiting for the thousand invited guests who never came. "Alphabetical" Morrison, who owed John Markley money, and had to go, told us in the office the next day that John Markley in evening clothes, with his great paunch swathed in a white silk vest, smirking like a gorged jackal, showing his fellow-townsmen for the first time his coarse, yellow teeth and his thin, cruel lips, looked like some horrible cartoon of his former self. Colonel Morrison did not describe the bride, but she passed our office that day, going the rounds of the dry-goods stores, giggling with the men clerks—a picture of sin that made men wet their lips. She was big, oversexed, and feline; rattling in silks, with an aura of sensuousness around her which seemed to glow like a coal, without a flicker of kindness or shame or sweetness, and which all the town knew instinctively must clinker into something black and ugly as the years went by.

So the threshold of the cottage on Exchange Street was not darkened by our people. And when the big house went up—a palace for a country town, though it only cost John Markley $25,000—he, who had been so reticent about his affairs in other years, tried to talk to his old friends of the house, telling them expansively that he was putting it up so that the town would have something in the way of a house for public gatherings; but he aroused no responsive enthusiasm, and long before the big opening reception his fervour had been quenched. Though we are a curious people, and though we all were anxious to know how the inside of the new house looked, we did not go to the reception; only the socially impossible, and the travelling men's wives at the Metropole, whom Mrs. Markley had met when she was boarding during the week they moved, gathered to hear the orchestra from Kansas City, to eat the Topeka caterer's food, and to fall down on the newly-waxed floors of the Markley mansion. But our professional instinct at the office told us that the town was eager for news of that house, and we took three columns to write up the reception. Our description of the place began with the swimming pool in the cellar and ended with the ballroom in the third story.

It took John Markley a long time to realise that the town was done with him, for there was no uprising, no demonstration, just a gradual loosening of his hold upon the community. In other years his neighbours had urged him and expected him to serve on the school-board, of which he had been chairman for a dozen years, but the spring that the big house was opened Mrs. Julia Worthington was elected in his place. At the June meeting of the Methodist Conference a new director was chosen to fill John Markley's place on the college board, and when he cancelled his annual subscription no one came to ask him to renew it. In the fall his party selected a new ward committeeman, and though Markley had been treasurer of the committee for a dozen years, his successor was named from the Worthington bank, and they had the grace not to come to Markley with the subscription-paper asking for money. It took some time for the sense of the situation to penetrate John Markley's thick skin; whereupon the fight began in earnest, and men around town said that John Markley had knocked the lid off his barrel. He doubled his donation to the county campaign fund; he crowded himself at the head of every subscription-paper; and frequently he brought us communications to print, offering to give as much money himself for the library, or the Provident Association, or the Y. M. C. A., as the rest of the town would subscribe combined. He mended church roofs under which he never had sat; he bought church bells whose calls he never heeded; and paid the greater part of the pipe-organ debts in two stone churches. Colonel Morrison remarked in the office one day that John Markley was raising the price of popular esteem so high that none but the rich could afford it. "But," chuckled the Colonel, "I notice old John hasn't got a corner on it yet, and he doesn't seem to have all he needs for his own use." The wrench that had torn open his treasure chest, had also loosened John Markley's hard face, and he had begun to smile. He became as affable as a man may who has lived for fifty years silent and self-contained. He beamed upon his old friends, and once or twice a week he went the rounds of the stores making small purchases, to let the clerks bask in his sunlight.

If a new preacher came to town the Markleys went to his church, and Mrs. Markley tried to be the first woman to call on his wife.

All the noted campaign speakers assigned to our town were invited to be the Markleys' guests, and Mrs. Markley sent her husband, red necktied, high-hatted and tailor-made, to the train to meet the distinguished guest. If the man was as much as a United States Senator, Markley hired the band, and in an open hack rode in solemn state with his prize through the town behind the tinkling cymbals, and then, with much punctility, took the statesman up and down Main Street afoot, into all the stores and offices, introducing him to the common people. At such times John Markley was the soul of cordiality; he seemed hungry for a kind look and a pleasant word with his old friends. About this time his defiant eyes began to lose their boring points, and to wander and hunt for something they had lost. When we had a State convention of the dominant party, the Markleys saw to it that the Governor and all the important people attending, with their wives, stopped in the big house. The Markleys gave receptions to them, which the men in our town dared not ignore, but sent their wives away visiting and went alone. This familiarity with politicians probably gave the Markleys the idea that they might help their status in the community if John Markley ran for Governor. He announced his candidacy, and the Kansas City papers, which did not appreciate the local situation, spoke well of him; but his boom died in the first month, when some of his old friends called at the back room of the bank to tell him that the Democrats would air his family affairs if he made another move. He looked up pitiably into Ab Handy's face when the men were done talking and said: "Don't you suppose they'll ever quit? Ain't they no statute of limitation?" And then he arose and stood by his desk with one arm akimbo and his other hand at his temple as he sighed: "Oh hell, Ab—what's the use? Tell 'em I'm out of it!"

Mrs. Markley seems to have shut him out of the G. A. R., thinking maybe that the old boys and their wives were not of her social level, or perhaps she had some idea of playing even with them, because their wives had not recognised her; but she shut away much of her husband's social comfort when she barred his comrades, and they in turn grew harder toward him than they were at first. As the Markleys entered their second year, Mrs. Markley alone in the big house, with only the new people from the hotel to eat her dinners, and with only the beer-drinking crowd from the West Side to dance in the attic ballroom, had much time to think, and she bethought her of the lecturers who were upon the college lecture course, whereupon John Markley had to carve for authors and explorers, and an occasional Senator or Congressman, who, after a hard evening's work on the platform, paid for his dinner and lodging by sitting up on a gilded high-backed and uncomfortable chair in the stately reception-room of the Markley home, talking John Markley into a snore, before Isabel let them go to bed. Isabel sent the accounts of these affairs to the office for us to print, with the lists of invited guests, who never accepted. And the town grinned.

At the end of two years John Markley's fat wit told him that it was a losing fight. He had been dropped from the head of the Merchants' Association; he was cut off from the executive committee of the Fair; he was not asked to serve on the railroad committee. His old friends, whom he asked over to spend the evening at his house, always had good excuses, which they gave him later over the telephone, and their wives, who used to call him by his first name, scarcely recognised him on the street. He quit coming to our office with pieces for the paper telling the town his views on this or that local matter; and gradually gave up the fight for his old place on the school board.

The clerks in the Markley Mortgage Company office say that he fell into a moody way, and would come to the office and refuse to speak to anyone for hours. Also, as the big house often glowed until midnight for a dance of the socially impossible who used the Markley ballroom, rent free, as a convenience, John Markley grew to have a sleepy look by day, and lines came into his red, shaved face. He grew anxious about his health, and a hundred worries tightened his belt and shook his great fat hand, just the least in the world, and when through some gossip that his wife brought him from the kitchen he felt the scorn of an old friend burn his soul like a caustic, for many days he would brood over it. Finally care began to chisel down his flinty face, to cut the fat from his bull neck, so that the cords stood out, and, through staring in impotent rage and pain at the ceiling in the darkness of the night, red rims began to worm around his eyes. He was not sixty years old then, and he had lashed himself into seventy.

However his money-cunning did not grow dull. He kept his golden touch and his impotent dollars piled higher and higher. The pile must have mocked Isabel Markley, for it could bring her nothing that she wanted. She stopped trying to give big parties and receptions. Her social efforts tapered down to little dinners for the new people in town. But as the dinner hour grew near she raged—so the servants said—whenever the telephone rang, and in the end she had to give up even the dinner scheme.

As the dinner hour grew near she raged—so the servants said—whenever the telephone rang

So there came a time when they began to take trips to the seashore and the mountains, flitting from hotel to hotel. In the office we knew when they changed quarters, for at each resort John Markley would see the reporters and give out a long interview, which was generally prefaced by the statement that he was a prominent Western capitalist, who had refused the nomination for Governor or for Senator, or for whatever Isabel Markley happened to think of; and papers containing these interviews, marked in green ink, came addressed to the office in her stylish, angular hand. During grand opera season one might see the Markleys hanging about the great hotels of Chicago or Kansas City, he a tired, sleepy-faced, prematurely old man, who seemed to be counting the hours till bed-time, and she a tailored, rather overfed figure, with a freshly varnished face and unhealthy, bright, bold eyes, walking slightly ahead of her shambling companion, looking nervously about her in search of some indefinite thing that was gone from her life.

One day John Markley shuffled into our office, bedizened as usual, and fumbled in his pocket for several minutes before he could find the copy of the Mexican Herald containing the news of his boy's death in Vera Cruz. He had passed the time of life for tears, yet when he asked us to reprint the item he said sadly: "The old settlers will remember him—maybe. I don't know whether they will or not." He seemed a pitiful figure as he dragged himself out of the office—so stooped and weazened, and so utterly alone, but when he turned around and came back upon some second thought, his teeth snapped viciously as he snarled: "Here, give it back. I guess I don't want it printed. They don't care for me, anyway."

The boys in his office told the boys in our office that the old man was cross and petulant that year, and there is no doubt that Isabel Markley was beginning to find her mess of pottage bitter. The women around town, who have a wireless system of collecting news, said that the Markleys quarrelled, and that she was cruel to him. Certain it is that she began to feed on young boys, and made the old fellow sit up in his evening clothes until impossible hours, for sheer appearance sake, while his bed was piled with the wraps of boys and girls from what our paper called the Hand-holders' Union, who were invading the Markley home, eating the Markley olives and canned lobster, and dancing to the music of the Markley pianola. Occasionally a young travelling man would be spoken of by these young people as Isabel Markley's fellow.

Mrs. Markley began to make fun of her husband to the girls of the third-rate dancing set whose mothers let them go to her house; also, she reviled John Markley to the servants. It was known in the town that she nicknamed him the "Goat." As for Markley, the fight was gone from him, and his whole life was devoted to getting money. That part of his brain which knew the accumulative secret kept its tireless energy; but his emotions, his sensibilities, his passions seemed to be either atrophied or burned out, and, sitting at his desk in the back room of the Mortgage Company's offices, he looked like a busy spider spinning his web of gold around the town. It was the town theory that he and Isabel must have fought it out to a finish about the night sessions; for there came a time when he went to bed at nine o'clock, and she either lighted up and prepared to celebrate with the cheap people at home, or attached one of her young men, and went out to some impossible gathering—generally where there was much beer, and many risqué things said, and the women were all good fellows. And thus another year flew by.

One night, when the great house was still, John Markley grew sick and, in the terror of death that, his office people say, was always with him, rose to call for help. In the dark hall, feeling for an electric-light switch, he must have lost his way, for he fell down the hard oak stairs. It was never known how long he lay there unable to move one-half of his body, but his wife stood nearly an hour at the front door that night, and when she finally switched on the light, she and the man with her saw Markley lying before them with one eye shut and with half his face withered and dead, the other half around the open eye quivering with hate. He choked on an oath, and shook at her a gnarled bare arm. Her face was flushed, and her tongue was unsure, but she laughed a shrill, wicked laugh and cried: "Ah, you old goat; don't you double your fist at me!"

Whereupon she shuddered away from the shaking figure at her feet and scurried upstairs. And the man standing in the doorway, wondering what the old man had heard, wakened the house, and helped to carry John Markley upstairs to his bed.

It was nearly three months before he could be wheeled to his office, where he still sits every day, spinning his golden web and filling his soul with poison. They say that, helpless as he is, he may live for a score of years. Isabel Markley knows how old she will be then. A thousand times she has counted it.

To see our town of a summer twilight, with the families riding abroad behind their good old nags, under the overhanging elms that meet above our newly-paved streets, one would not think that there could exist in so lovely a place as miserable a creature as John Markley is; or as Isabel, his wife, for that matter. The town—out beyond Main Street, which is always dreary and ugly with tin gorgons on the cornices—the town is a great grove springing from a bluegrass sod, with porch boxes making flecks of colour among the vines; cannas and elephant ears and foliage plants rise from the wide lawns; and children bloom like moving flowers all through the picture.

There are certain streets, like the one past the Markley mansion, upon which we make it a point always to drive with our visitors—show streets we may as well frankly call them—and one of these leads down a wide, handsome street out to the college. There the town often goes in its best bib and tucker to hear the lecturers whom Mrs. Markley feeds. Last winter one came who converted Dan Gregg—once Governor, but for ten years best known among us as the town infidel. The lecturer explained how matter had probably evolved from some one form—even the elements coming in a most natural way from a common source. He made it plain that all matter is but a form of motion; that atoms themselves are divided into ions and corpuscles, which are merely different forms of electrical motion, and that all this motion seems to tend to one form, which is the spirit of the universe. Dan said he had found God there, and, although the pious were shocked, in our office we were glad that Dan had found his God anywhere. While we were sitting in front of the office one fine evening this spring, looking at the stars and talking of Dan Gregg's God and ours, we began to wonder whether or not the God that is the spirit of things at the base of this material world might not be indeed the spirit that moves men to execute His laws. Men in the colleges to-day think they have found the moving spirit of matter; but do they know His wonderful being as well as the old Hebrew prophets knew it who wrote the Psalms and the Proverbs and the wisdom of the Great Book. That brought us back to the old question about John Markley. Was it God, moving in us, that punished Markley "by the rod of His wrath," that used our hearts as wireless stations for His displeasure to travel through, or was it the chance prejudice of a simple people? It was late when we broke up and left the office—Dan Gregg, Henry Larmy, the reporter, and old George. As we parted, looking up at the stars where our ways divided out under the elms, we heard, far up Exchange Street, the clatter of the pianola in the Markley home, and saw the high windows glowing like lost souls in the night.

VIII

"A Bundle of Myrrh"

One of the first things that a new reporter on our paper has to learn is the kinology of the town. Until he knows who is kin to whom, and how, a reporter is likely at any time to make a bad break. Now, the kinology of a country town is no simple proposition. After a man has spent ten years writing up weddings, births and deaths, attending old settlers' picnics, family reunions and golden weddings, he may run into a new line of kin that opens a whole avenue of hitherto unexplainable facts to him, showing why certain families line up in the ward primaries, and why certain others are fighting tooth and toe-nail.

The only person in town who knows all of our kinology—and most of that in the county, where it is a separate and interminable study—is "Aunt" Martha Merryfield. She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield. She is literally aunt to over a hundred people here, and the habit of calling her aunt has spread from them to the rest of the population.

She lives alone in the big brick house on the hill, though her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in and out all day and most of the night, so that she is not at all lonesome. She is the only person to whom we can look for accurate information about local history, and when a man dies who has been at all prominent in affairs of the town or county or State, we always call up "Aunt" Martha on the 'phone, or send a reporter to her, to learn the real printable and unprintable truth about him. She knows whom he "went with" before he was married, and why they "broke off," and what crowd he associated with in the early days; how he got his money, and what they used to "say" about him. If a family began putting on frills, she can tell how the head of the house got his start by stealing "aid" sent to the grasshopper sufferers and opening a store with the goods. If a woman begins speaking of the hired girl as her "maid," contrary to the vernacular rules of the town, Aunt Martha does not hesitate to bring up the subject of the flour-sack underwear which the woman wore when she was a girl during the drought of '60.

Aunt Martha used to bring us flowers for the office table, and it was her delight to sit down and take out her corn-knife—as she called it—and go after the town shams. She has promised a dozen times to write an article for the paper, which she says we dare not print, entitled "Self-made Women I Have Known." She says that men were always bragging about how they had clerked, worked on farms, dug ditches and whacked mules across the plains before the railroads came; but that their wives insisted that they were princesses of the royal blood. She says she is going to include in her Self-made Women only those who have worked out, and she maintains that we will be surprised at the list.

Her particular animosity in the town is Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington. Aunt Martha told us that when Tim Neal came to town he had a brogue you could scrape with a knife and an "O" before his name you could hoop a hogshead with. "And that woman," exclaimed Aunt Martha, when she was under full sail, "that woman, because she has two bookcases in the front room and reads the book-reviews in the Delineator, thinks that she is cultured. When her folks first came to town they were as poor as Job's turkey, which was not to their discredit—everyone was poor in those days. The old man Neal was as honest an old Mick as you'd meet in a day's journey, or at a fair, and he used to run a lemonade and peanut stand down by the bank corner. But his girls, who were raised on it, until they began teaching school, used to refer to the peanut stand as 'papa's hobby,' pretend that he only ran it for recreation, and say: 'Now why do you suppose papa enjoys it?—We just can't get him to give it up!' And now Julia is president of the Woman's Federation, has stomach trouble, has had two operations, and is suffering untold agonies with acute culturitis. And yet," Aunt Martha would say through a beatific smile, "she's a good-enough woman in many ways, and I wouldn't say anything against her for the world."

Once Miss Larrabee, the society editor, brought back this from a visit to Aunt Martha: "I know, my dear, that your paper says there are no cliques and crowds in society in this town, and that it is so democratic. But you and I know the truth. We know about society in this town. We know that if there ever was a town that looked like a side of bacon—streak of lean and streak of fat all the way down—it is this blessed place. Crowds?—why, I've lived here over fifty years and it was always crowds. 'Way back in the days when the boys used to pick us up and carry us across Elm Creek when we went to dances, there were crowds. The girls who crossed on the boys' backs weren't considered quite proper by the girls who were carried over in the boys' arms. And they didn't dance in the same set."

Miss Larrabee says she looked into the elder woman's eyes to find which crowd Aunt Martha belonged to, when she flashed out:

"Oh, child, you needn't look at me—I did both; it depended on who was looking! But, as I was saying, if anyone knows about society in this town, I do. I went to every dance in town for the first twenty-five years, and I have made potato salad to pay the salary of every Methodist preacher for the past thirty years, and I ought to know what I'm talking about." There was fire enough to twinkle in her old eyes as she spoke. "Beginning at the bottom, one may say that the base of society is the little tads, ranging down from what your paper calls the Amalgamated Hand-holders, to the trundle-bed trash just out of their kissing games. It's funny to watch the little tads grow up and pair off and see how bravely they try to keep in the swim. I've seen ten grandchildren get out and I've a great-grandchild whose mother will be pushing her out before she is old enough to know anything. When young people get married they all say they're not going to be old-marriedy, and they hang on to the dances and little hops until the first baby comes. Then they don't get out to the dances much, but they join a card club."

In her dissertation on the social progress of young married people, Aunt Martha explained that after the second year the couple go only to the big dances where everyone is invited, but they pay more attention to cards. The young mother begins going to afternoon parties, and has the other young married couples in for dinner. Then, before they know it, they are invited out to receptions and parties, where little tads preside at the punch-bowls and wait on table, and are seen and not heard. Aunt Martha continued:

"By the time the second baby comes they take one of two shoots—either go in for church socials or edge into a whist club. In this town, I think, on the whole, that the Congregational Whist Club is younger and gayer than the Presbyterian Whist Club, but in most towns the Episcopalians have the really fashionable club. Of course, these clubs never call themselves by the church names, but they are generally made up along church lines—except we poor Methodists and Baptists—we have to divide ourselves out among the others to keep the preacher from going after us."

Aunt Martha's eyes danced with the mischief in her heart as she went on: "Now, if after the second baby comes, the young parents begin to feel like saving money, and being someone at the bank, they join the church and go in for church socials, which don't take so much time or money as the whist clubs and receptions. The babies keep coming and the young people keep on improving their home, moving from the little house to the big house; the young man's name begins to creep into lists of directors at the bank, and they are invited out to the big parties, and she goes to all the stand-up and 'gabble-gobble-and-git' receptions. As they grow older, they are asked with the preachers and widows for the first night of a series of parties at a house to get them out of the way and over with before the young folks come later in the week. When they get to a point where the young folks laugh and clap their hands at little pudgy daddy when he dances 'Old Dan Tucker' at the big parties in the brick houses, it's all up with them—they are old married folks, and the next step takes them to the old folks' whist club, where the bankers' wives and the insurance widows run things. That is the inner sanctuary, the holy of holies in the society of this town."

After a pause Aunt Martha added: "You'd think, to hear these chosen people talk, that the benighted souls who go to missionary teas, Woman's Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, and get up bean-dinners for the church on election day, live on another planet. Yet I guess we're all made of the same kind of mud.

"That reminds me of the Winthrops. When they came here, back in the sixties, it happened to be Fourth of July, and the band was out playing in the grove by the depot. Mrs. Winthrop got off the train quite grandly and bowed and waved her hand to the band, and the Judge walked over and gave the band leader five dollars. They said afterward that they felt deeply touched to find a raw Western town so appreciative of the coming of an old New England family, that it greeted them with a band. Before Mrs. Winthrop had been here three weeks she called on me, 'as one of the first ladies of the town,' she said, to organise and see if we couldn't break up the habit of the hired girls eating at the table with the family." Aunt Martha smiled and her eyes glittered as she added: "After they organised, the titled aristocracy of this town did their own work and sent the washing out for a year or more."

The talk drifted back to the old days, and Aunt Martha got out her photograph-album and showed Miss Larrabee the pictures of those whom she called "the rude forefathers of the village," in their quaint old costumes of war-times. In the book were baby pictures of middle-aged men and women, and youthful pictures of the old men and women of the town. But most interesting of all to Miss Larrabee were the daguerreotypes—quaint old portraits in their little black boxes, framed in plush and gilt. The old woman brought out picture after picture—her husband's among the others, in a broad beaver hat with a high choker taken back in Brattleboro before he came to Kansas. She looked at it for a long minute, and then said gaily to Miss Larrabee: "He was a handsome boy—quite the beau of the State when we were married—Judge of the District Court at twenty-four." She held the case in her hand and went on opening the others. She came to one showing a moustached and goateed youth in a captain's uniform—a slim, straight, soldierly figure. As she passed it to Miss Larrabee Aunt Martha looked sidewise at her, saying: "You wouldn't know him now. Yet you see him every day, I suppose." After the girl shook her head, the elder woman continued: "Well, that's Jim Purdy, taken the day he left for the army." She sighed as she said: "Let me see, I guess I haven't happened to run across Jim for ten years or more, but he didn't look much like this then. Poor old Jim, they tell me he's not having the best time in the world. Someway, all the old-timers that are living seem to be hard up, or in bad health, or unhappy. It doesn't seem right, after what they've done and what they've gone through. But I guess it's the way of life. It's the way life gets even with us for letting us outlive the others. Compensation—as Emerson says."

"Jim Purdy, taken the day he left for the army"

Miss Larrabee came down the lilac-bordered walk from the stately old brick house, carrying a great bouquet of sweet peas and nasturtiums and poppies and phlox, a fleeting memory of some association she had in her mind of Uncle Jimmy Purdy and Aunt Martha kept tantalising her. She could not get it out of the background of her consciousness, and yet it refused to form itself into a tangible conception. It was associated vaguely with her own grandmother, as though, infinite ages ago, her grandmother had said something that had lodged the idea in the girl's head.

When the occasion made itself, Miss Larrabee asked her grandmother the question that puzzled her, and learned that Martha Perkins and Jim Purdy were lovers before the war, and that she was wearing his ring when he went away—thinking he would be back in a few weeks with the Rebellion put down. In his first fight he was shot in the head and was in the hospital for a year, demented; when he was put back in the ranks he was captured and his name given out among the killed. In prison his dementia returned and he stayed there two years. Then for a year after his exchange he followed the Union Army like a dumb creature, and not until two years after the close of the war did the poor fellow drift home again, as one from the dead—all uncertain of the past and unfitted for the future.

And his sweetheart drank her cup alone. The old settlers say that she never flinched nor shrank, but for years, even after her marriage to the Judge, the young woman kept a little grave covered with flowers, that bore the simple words: "Martha, aged five months and three days." They say that she did not lose her courage and that she bent her head for no one. But the war brought her neighbours so many sorrows that Martha's trouble was forgotten, the years passed and only the old people of the community know about the little grave beside the Judge's and their little boy's. Jimmy Purdy grew into a smooth-faced, unwrinkled, rather blank-eyed old man, clerking in the bookstore for a time, serving as City Clerk for twenty years, and later living at the Palace Hotel on his pension. He worshipped Aunt Martha's children and her children's children, but he never saw her except when they met in some casual way. She was married when he came back from the war, and if he ever knew her agony he never spoke of it. Whenever he talked of the events before the war, his face wore a troubled, baffled look, and he did not seem to remember things clearly. He was a simple old man with a boyish face and heart who was confused by the world growing old around him.

One day they found him dead in his bed. And Miss Larrabee hurried out to Aunt Martha's to get the facts about his life for the paper. It was a bright October morning as she went up the walk to the old brick house, and she heard someone playing on the piano, rolling the chords after the grandiose manner of pianists fifty years ago. A voice seemed to be singing an old ballad. As the girl mounted the steps the voice came more distinctly to her. It was quavering and unsure, but with a moan of passion the words came forth:

"As I lay my heart on your dead heart,—Douglas, Douglas, Douglas, tender and true——"

Suddenly the voice choked in a groan. As she stood by the open door Miss Larrabee could see in the darkened room the figure of an old woman racked with sobs on a great mahogany sofa, and on the floor beside her lay a daguerreotype, glinting its gilt and glass through the gloom.

The girl tiptoed across the porch, down the steps through the garden and out of the gate.

IX

Our Loathed but Esteemed Contemporary

No one remembers a time when there were not two newspapers in our town—generally quarrelling with each other. Though musicians and doctors and barbers are always jealous of their business rivals, and though they show their envy more or less to their discredit, editors are so jealous of one another, and so shameless about it, that the profession has been made a joke. Certainly in our town there is a deep-seated belief that if one paper takes one side of any question, even so fair a proposition as street-paving, the other will take the opposing side.

Of course, our paper has not been contrary; but we have noticed a good many times—every one in the office has noticed it, the boys and girls in the back-office, and the boys and girls in the front-office—that whenever we take a stand for anything, say for closing the stores at six o'clock, the General swings the Statesman into line against it. If he has done it once he has done it fifty times in the last ten years; and, though we have often felt impelled to oppose some of the schemes which he has brought forward, it has been because they were bad for the town, and perhaps because, even though they did seem plausible, we knew that the unscrupulous gang that was behind these schemes would in some way turn them into a money-making plot to rob the people. We never could see that justification in the Statesman's position. To us it seemed merely pigheadedness. But the passing years are teaching us to appreciate the General better, and each added year is seeming to make us more tolerant of his shortcomings.

Counting in the three years he was in the army, he has been running the Statesman for forty-five years, and for thirty-five years he was master of the field. For thirty years this town was known as General A. Jackson Durham's town. He ran the county Republican conventions, and controlled the five counties next to ours, so that, though he could never go to Congress himself, on account of his accumulation of enemies, he always named the successful candidate from the district, and for a generation held undisturbed the selection of post-masters within his sphere of influence. In State politics he was more powerful than any Congressman he ever made. Often he came down to the State Convention with blood in his eye after the political scalp of some politician who had displeased him, and the fight he made and the disturbance he started, gave him the name of Old Bull Durham. On such occasions, he would throw back his head, shut his eyes and roar his wrath at his opponents in a most disquieting manner, and when he returned home, whether he had won or lost his fight, his paper would bristle for two or three weeks with rage, and his editorial page would be full of lurid articles written in short exclamatory sentences, pocked with italics, capital letters and black-faced lines.

He advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing callers at his office his barrel

For General A. Jackson Durham was a fire-eater and was proud of it. He advertised the fact that he was a good hater by showing his barrel to callers at his office. In that barrel he had filed away every disreputable thing that he had been able to find against friend or foe, far or near, and when the friend became a foe, or the foe became troublesome, the General opened his barrel. He kept also an office blacklist, on which were written the names of the men in town that were never to be printed in the Statesman. When we established our little handbill of a newspaper, he made all manner of fun of our "dish-rag," as he called it, and insisted on writing so much about our paper that people read it to see what we had to say. Other papers had made the mistake of replying to the General in kind, and people had soon tired of the quarrel and dropped the new quarrelling paper for the old one. The State never had seen the General's equal as a wrangler; but we did not fight back, and there was only a one-sided quarrel for the people to tire of. We grew and got a foothold in the town, but the General never admitted it. He does not admit it now, though his paper has been cut down time and again, and is no larger than our little dish-rag was in the beginning. But he still maintains his old assumption of the power that departed years ago. He walked proudly out of the County Convention the day that it rode over him, and he still begins the names of the new party leaders in the county in small letters to show his contempt for them.

The day of his downfall in the County Convention marked the beginning of his decline in State politics. When it was known that his county was against him, people ceased to fear him and in time new leaders came in the State whom he did not know even by sight; but the General did not recognise them as leaders. To him they were interlopers. He sent his paper regularly to the old leaders, who had been shoved aside as he had been, and wrote letters to them urging them to arouse the people to throw off the chains of bossdom. Five years ago he and a number of lonesome and forgotten ones, who formerly ruled the State with an iron hand, and whose arrogance had cost the party a humiliating defeat, organised the "Anti-Boss League," and held semi-annual conventions at the capital. They made long speeches and issued long proclamations, and called vehemently upon the people to rend their chains, but some way the people didn't heed the call, and the General and his boss-busters, as they were called, began to have hard work getting their "calls" and "proclamations" and "addresses" into the city papers. The reporters referred to them as the Ancient Order of Has-Beens, and wounded the General's pride by calling him Past Master of the Grand Lodge of Hons. He came home from the meeting of the boss-busters at which this insult had been heaped upon him and bellowed like a mad bull for six months, using so much space in his paper that there was no room at all for local news.

In the General's idea of what a newspaper should contain; news does not come first, and he does not mind crowding it out. He believes that a newspaper should stand for "principles." The Statesman was started during the progress of the Civil War, when issues were news, and the General has never been able to realize that in times of peace people buy a newspaper for its news and not for its opinions. He never could understand our attitude toward what he called "principles." When the town was for free silver, we were for the gold standard, and we never exerted ourselves particularly for a high tariff, and when the General saw our paper grow in spite of its heresies, he was amazed, and expressed his amazement in columns of vitriolic anger. Because we often ignored "issues" and "principles" and "great basic and fundamental ideas," as he called his contentions on the silver and tariff questions, for lists of delegates at conventions, names of pupils at the county institute, and winners of prizes at the fair, he was filled with alarm for the future of the noble calling of journalism.

Long ago we quit making fun of him. One day we wrote an article referring to him as "the old man," and it was gossiped among the printers that he was cut to the heart. He did not reply to that, and although a few days later he referred to us as thieves and villains, we never had the heart to tease him again, and now every one around the office has instructions to put "General" before his name whenever it is used. Probably this cheers him up. At least it should do so, for in spite of his pride and his much advertised undying wrath, he is in truth a tender-hearted old man, and has never been disloyal to the town. It is the apple of his eye. His fierceness has always been more for publication than as an evidence of good faith. He likes to think that he is unforgiving and relentless, but he has a woman's heart. He fought the renomination of Grant for a third term most bitterly, but when the old commander died, the boys in the Statesman office say that Durham sniffled gently while he wrote the obituary, and when he closed with the words "Poor Grant," he laid his head on the table and his frame shook in real sorrow.

In Our Town

In Our Town

BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

The Court of Boyville, The Real Issue, Stratagems and Spoils

Illustrations by F. R. Gruger and W. Glackens

NEW YORKMcCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.MCMVI

Copyright 1906 byMcCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

Published April, 1906

Copyright 1904 by The Century Co.Copyright 1905-1906 by The Curtis Publishing Co.

He wore his collars so high that he had to order them from a drummer

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

IN OUR TOWN

I

Scribes and Pharisees