Which Swamps the Post-Office Every Friday

No, Jim, as I have already said about thirty-four times this week, I don't care for a paper. Don't buy one for me. I could read your New York papers for twenty-four hours at a stretch, and at the end of the time I would have to stop some good-natured looking chap and ask what the news was. It's all there, I know, but I don't seem able to find it. Even the Chicago baseball scores are hidden in the blamed things. Instead of putting them first, the way they ought to, they stick them down at the end of the page. As for the editorial pages, I might as well go to Labrador and hunt for personal friends as to read them. If there's anything that makes a stranger feel about ten thousand miles from home, with the cars not running, it is to get into the editorial page of an unknown newspaper and try to sit in with the family discussions. It makes me feel like a man who has gotten into a reunion of the Old Settlers' Association of Zanzibar by mistake.

It's not much of a trick to go into a strange town and learn to navigate from hotel to hotel, but it's a hopeless task to try to find your way around a strange newspaper. Takes about two years to learn to read a strange newspaper skilfully, anyway, and find your way through it without banging into the want ads when you want to find the editorials, and tripping over the poets' column when you are hunting for the crop reports. You've been buying a paper every time you turned a corner for the last week, Jim—you New Yorkers seem to have to have a paper about as often as a whale needs a new lungful of air—and I've taken a hasty look at all of them, but when I get home I am going to ask my wife what has happened in the U. S. while I've been away from Homeburg. Outside of the eternal Mexican case, I don't seem to have discovered a thing.

Mind you, I don't blame your papers for bearing down hard on the local news. I suppose it's mighty interesting to you New Yorkers to learn every morning just how much more money you owe on your new subway, and whether or not the temperature of Mrs. Van Damexpense's second-best Siberian wolf-hound is still rising. That's what newspapers are for—to save you the trouble of stepping around and collecting the events of the day from the back fence. But your papers don't bear down hard enough on the Homeburg happenings, and that's why they don't suit me.

I don't pretend that our Homeburg paper is the equal of yours in any particular. The best I can say for it is that it's no worse than it was ten years ago. It hasn't any three-story type, and you could read it for years without discovering who was being divorced in San Francisco or murdered in Chicago. People who depend on it don't know yet that war has been declared in the Balkans, and they won't hear any more politics until 1916. All week long I think as little about the paper as all this. But somehow, when Thursday evening comes around, rain or shine, I step over to the post-office, and if my paper isn't there, I wait a few minutes, growing more impatient all the time, and then I drift over to the door of the Homeburg Weekly Democrat office and join the silent throng.

Like as not I'll find twenty people there. We don't expect any wild news. There will probably not be anything in the Democrat when it comes out, but we want to make sure of it. We don't want to go home without the paper. We've read it for twenty years, and every week we open it up and poke through its internals after a sensation that will stand Homeburg on its ear and split the Methodist church from steeple to pipe organ. We're as patient as fishers in the Seine, and the fact that the world has never rocked when the Democrat did come out doesn't discourage us any.

We want our paper, and so we stand there and grumble. Now and then one of us stumps up the narrow hallway to the second story where the Democrat makes its lair, and looks on with an abused air while two young lady compositors claw around the bottom of the boxes for enough type to set the last items, and the foreman stuffs the forms of the last two pages with old boiler plate, medicine ads and anything that will fill. There isn't any reason for the Democrat being late any more than there is for the branch accommodation train, which got almost to town on time once and stood beyond the crossing for twenty minutes because her conductor forgot just when she was due and didn't want to run in too soon. The Democrat is just late naturally. It's part of its function to be late. Makes it more eagerly sought after. We talk with the foreman and make nuisances of ourselves generally, and presently old man Ayers, who runs the paper, waddles in with another item to be set. The compositors set down their sticks with a jerk and say, "Oh, my land!" and the foreman goes and puts the item on the case with that air of patient resignation which is a little more irritating than a swift kick; and then Chet Frazier, if he's hanging around, which he usually is, speaks up:

"For goodness' sakes, Ayers, let that item go and get to press," he says. "Give it to me and I'll read it aloud down-stairs, your whole subscription list's down there waiting."

But we have to wait just the same until the item is set up. Then the foreman locks up the forms and bangs them on the face with his big wooden plane, and he and the old man lug them out into the pressroom while we all hold our breath—sometimes the form explodes on the way and then we don't get the Democrat for three days.

Pretty soon we hear the rattle-te-bang-te-clank-te-clicketty-clang of the old press, and in five minutes more Editor Ayers comes out with an armful of folded papers all fragrant with fresh black ink.

She's out, boys, he says.

"She's out, boys," he says.

"She's out, boys," he says. Then we grab copies and hurry to spread the news of the birth of another Democrat. We open the sheet and look carefully down the page where old man Ayers generally conceals his local news. For a minute or two there is silence. Then somebody crams his paper into his pocket. "Hmph, nothing in it," he says, and starts home.

He's right, too. Outside of the fact that it has another week of old man Ayers's laborious and worried life in it, it is mighty bare. There isn't enough news in it to cause a thrill in a sewing circle. But after supper at home, when we look it over more carefully and the first hot flush of anticipation has worn off, we do find a lot of information. We find that Miss Ollie Mingle has gone to Paynesville for a two days' visit (aha, that Paynesville young man's folks are going to look her over), and that Mrs. Ackley is visiting her daughter in Ogallala, Neb. (Unless Ackley straightens up, we don't expect her back.) Wimble Horn is erecting a new porch and painting his house. (He must have beaten the bucket shop for once.) We also find that Jedson Bane's peaches are ripe and of the best quality, which fact he has just proven to the editor's entire satisfaction. And that old Mrs. Gastit is feeling very poorly, and Pete Parson, while working on his automobile the other night, contributed a forefinger to the cause of gasoline by poking around in the cogs while the engine was running.

All of this is news and interesting to us; so is the fact that Miss Ri Hawkes is not teaching in the Snyder district school this week, because of a sore toe. While this item does not jar the country quite so extensively as it would if Miss Hawkes belonged to one of your leading New York families, and was employing an eleven-thousand-dollar physician to treat her for gout, it is just as important to Miss Hawkes. And there you have the great keynote of our Homeburg journalism. In the eyes of the Democrat we are all equal.

There are not many of us Homeburgers. We will never see twenty-five hundred again, for as families grow smaller, most of the Illinois towns like Homeburg are contracting slowly in size even while prosperous. The Democrat hasn't above seven hundred subscribers, but every one of those subscribers gets his name in the paper at least once a year, even if it is only a general mention of his patriotism when he pays his annual subscription. No baby born in Homeburg is too humble to get its exact weight heralded to the world through the Democrat. Mrs. Maloney's pneumonia and Banker Payley's quinsy grieve the town in the same paragraph under the heading "Among our sick." The Widow Swanson's ten-mile trip down the line to a neighboring town gets as careful attention as Mrs. Singer's annual pilgrimage to California. In the matter of news we are a pure democracy. The man who buys a new automobile gets no more space than the member of Patrick McQuinn's section crew who scores a clean scoop by digging his potatoes one week ahead of the town. And when the humblest of us lies down in death he does it with the serene consciousness that he will get half a column, anyway, with more if his disease is rare and interesting, and that at the end of the article the city will sympathize with the family in its bereavement. When Mrs. Agnew died of her broken hip she got a column, though she had been financially unable to take the paper for years, while in the same issue Jay Gould got a two-inch obituary in its boiler plate inside.

Your big papers pride themselves on their brevity, except in murder cases, and I understand that almost every New York editor thinks he could boil the story of the Creation down into less than the six hundred words which the Bible wasted on it. But Editor Ayers could give all your editors instructions in this kind of economy. If the Creation had happened around Homeburg while he was on the job, he would have called attention to it the next week about as follows:

"We understand there was a creation in these parts during the last week. We did not learn the particulars but those who were on the ground at the time say that it was a successful affair, and that the new world is doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances."

Ayers would write it this way for two reasons. In the first place he hates to write more than one paragraph. Coming after a hard day's work collecting bills and chasing subscribers, it is a wearing effort. Nothing gets much space in the Democrat except obituaries and marriages, and they are all contributed—the former by the relatives and the latter by the minister. In the second place, there wouldn't be any use of wasting a lot of space on a big item because by the time the Democrat comes out, everybody knows all about it, and the mere facts would be stale and unimportant beside the superstructure of soaring fancy which has been built up by the easy-running imaginations of our chief news dispensers on the street corners. And so, when the creamery burns down or the evening fast freight runs through an accommodation on the crossing, the old man puts his duty off until the last minute and then writes a few well-chosen lines merely to let us know that he is on the job and lets no news escape him. When you are running a weekly paper, your competitors in the news business are the talkers in the town who mingle seven days a week and issue a hundred thrilling extras to their fellow citizens before your press day comes around.

Besides, as I have said, old man Ayers can't afford to waste much time chasing news. He has to get a living for himself as well as for the Democrat, and keeping both his family and the paper alive is a distinct feat performed weekly. His pay-roll for a foreman and two girls must amount to over fifteen dollars a week, and that means cold solid cash which must be wrung from a reluctant public. Seems to me I never go into a store that I don't see old man Ayers trying to collect a little cash on an advertising account or wheedling a subscriber into coming out of the misty past and creeping cautiously down a few years toward the present on his subscription account. If there is anything which we can't do without and for which we positively object to paying real money, it is our home newspaper. Sim Bone has a roaring shoe business and pays cash for his automobiles, but he has often told me that paying good paper money for advertising would be as wasteful as eating it. He carries an ad in the Democrat all the year and changes it about every six months. It's July now, and he is still advertising bargains in overshoes—but he won't pay any money. Ayers has to trade the account out, as he has to do with every other advertiser in the town.

People pity the poor ministers' families who have to live on the scrambled proceeds of donation parties, but an editor's family in our parts has even harder luck. I have seen Ayers order two suits of clothes from a clothier who owed him a big bill and was getting wabbly, and then pass by the meat market empty-handed, because his advertising account there was traded out. He told me once that he has taken disk-plows, flaxseed, magazines, encyclopedias and a new back porch in trade for advertising and subscriptions, but that he has been wearing an obsolete pair of spectacles, to his great discomfort, for ten years, because our local jeweler will not advertise. The doctors in town carry cards in the paper and owe him large amounts because his family is too healthy to catch up with them; but it will be two years before either of our local dentists accumulates a big enough bill to allow Mrs. Ayers to have some very necessary construction and betterment work, as the railroad folks say, done to her teeth.

If it weren't for the patent medicine ads, Ayers tells me, he wouldn't be able to keep afloat for want of ready cash. He says a patent medicine may be an abomination before the Lord, but that a patent medicine advertising agent looks to him like a very present help in time of trouble. The agent comes in and beats him down until he agrees to publish several hundred yards of notices next to pure reading matter on all sides for fifteen dollars. But the fifteen dollars is cash—he doesn't have to take the stuff in trade. And so we are forever running into such thrilling headlines as, "Horrible Wreck," "Her escape was simply marvelous," "Worse than the Titanic Disaster," in the Democrat's local page. And then we exclaim: "Hurray! Real news at last," and prowl eagerly down the items only to find that the horrible wreck was a citizen of Swamp Hollow upon whom a wonderful cure was effected; that "Her escape" was from inflammatory rheumatism by the aid of Gettem's Dead Shot Specific, and that the Titanic Disaster is eclipsed annually by the sad ends of thousands of people who neglect to take Palaver's Punk Pills. It always makes us mad, but we can't kick. If it weren't for the patent medicine people, we would have to pay for the Democrat all by ourselves.

They say that when Editor Ayers first came to Homeburg some forty years ago he was a bright young man with a great rush of words from the pen, and that he had a dapper air and was generally admired. The Democrat contained about a page of solid editorial opinion each week on everything, from the tariff to the duty of Russia, in whatever crisis was then pending, and people swore by the paper and didn't make up their opinions until they had read it. But times have changed. We don't stand in awe of the Democrat any more. Most of us laugh at it, even those of us who are not financiers enough to keep our subscriptions called up. We call it the "Weekly Gimlet" and the "Poorly Democrat," and we make bright remarks to old man Ayers when he asks us for news and tell him that he ought to turn the paper inside out so that we can read the boiler plate first and not have to wade through his stuff. But he doesn't object. Time and toil and the worry of keeping cash enough on hand to pay the expressman who dumps his ready prints on the floor each Wednesday and refuses to budge until he has collected $3.24 have taken the pepper out of him. He doesn't write editorials any more except on the week following a national election, and they are affairs of duty which always begin: "Another election has come and gone and the party of Jackson—"

He has made a living for forty years and has sent two sons through college from the Democrat, and the effort has taken the fight out of him. I never saw him resent a joke but once. That was when Pelty Amthorne told him that his wife considered the Democrat to be the best paper she had ever seen. He let Ayers burst a couple of buttons from his vest in his swelling pride before he explained that the Democrat, when cut in two, exactly fitted his wife's pantry shelves, and that she didn't have to trim it a bit. The old man turned on his heel without a word and that week he kindled his old-time fires and wrote the following for the local page:

A citizen of Homeburg who hasn't done anything more exciting for twenty years than stand off his grocery bill poked fun at the Democrat last week to our face because there wasn't any more news in it. News, say we—News in Homeburg? News in a town where an ice-cream social is a sensation and a dog fight suspends business for three hours? News in a town where it takes a couple five years to work up a wedding and seven kinds of wedding cake is the only news in it? Where the city marshal hasn't made an arrest for two years because no one has done anything after nine p.m. except snore, and where they have to put up the lamps in pairs to keep them from getting lonesome? We don't print news from Homeburg because there isn't any, and the old rooster who joshed us knows it. He's sore because we can't make half a column out of his trip to Paynesville eight miles away last summer, but we'll promise to do better. We'll dump the paste pot in the fire, throw the old shears out of the window and get out a regular screamer of a Democrat some week; a paper with red ink on it and big headlines and a real piece of news in it. We will when this gabby old fossil does his part. When he pays his six years' subscription, we'll write two columns about it. And even then no one will believe it.

Lafe Simpson, who runs the Argus, is a younger man than Ayers and more ambitious. Oh, yes, we have two papers. In a town the size of Homeburg you simply have to have two papers, because half of the people are always mad at one paper. The Argus and Democrat trade subscription lists about every seven years—not counting the hard-shell Democrats and blown-in-the-bottle Republicans who have to stand by their papers whether they get mad at them or not. I've been taking the Democrat for about five years because Simpson got too busy in the school election one year to suit me. It's pretty hard on me, because Simpson runs a better paper; but my neighbor, Sim Askinson, likes the Democrat better and can't take it because he took his whole family to Chicago one week, and Ayers overlooked the fact. So he borrows my Democrat every week and I get his Argus, and thus both of us preserve our mad and our dignity and get what we want just the same.

If there's anything keener than the competition between two weekly newspapers in a small town, I'd like to see it—but not feel it. It's a searching sort of competition which seems to work its way into every detail of the town's affairs. We town people are judged by our editors according to our patronage. If a man gives two jobs of letterheads in succession to the Argus, Ayers looks on him as a man who has stabbed him in the back and has twisted the sword. If the Board of Education spends $67 for commencement invitations with the Democrat one year and $69.50 with the Argus the next, things aren't exactly calm and peaceable again until the discrimination has been explained. When twins come to a man who has always taken the Argus in preference to the Democrat, old man Ayers wags his head as if to say, "He brought it on himself;" and when Lafe Simpson meets a man who persistently refuses to take his paper in preference to the sheet across the street, he greets him as formally and warily as if he had smallpox and was passing free samples around.

Lafe claims to have more circulation than the Democrat, and this comes nearer giving Ayers apoplexy than anything else. He claims that Lafe's circulation consists two thirds of wind and that he hasn't more than 750 bona fide subscribers, including deadhead copies to patent medicine houses. Lafe, on the other hand, says Ayers prints 750 papers merely from force of habit—that most of his subscribers have been trying to stop the paper for years and can't. Lafe says that when a man puts his name on Ayers's subscription list, he might as well carve it in stone and then try to wipe it off with gasoline. Ayers says, in return, that when a stranger arrives to make his home in Homeburg, Lafe Simpson meets him at the train, takes him to his new residence, and hangs around the doorstep until the stranger subscribes for the Argus in order to improve the atmosphere around the neighborhood.

Of course the two papers are always on opposite political sides—no matter whether it is a school or national election. Makes us scheme a good deal at times to keep one of them quiet on some public project so that the other will not jump on it. We had a big time, when the plan to pave Main Street was going through, to keep Lafe from jumping in and shouting for it. That would have set Ayers off dead against it, and we had to muzzle Lafe until Ayers had committed himself.

The struggles of the two editors to outdo each other have been titanic. When Simpson put in a steam engine, Ayers mortgaged his plant and got one of the new gasoline engines just then being introduced into an unhappy world. He never used it much unless he had lots of time in which to start it, but it was a great comfort and held Simpson level. When Simpson bought the building in which the Argus is printed, it nearly killed Ayers, who couldn't have bought the sign on his building. But he finally prevailed on the owner to put in a new front and name his block "The Democrat Building." But about that time Simpson, who is a go-ahead young chap, bought a young automobile in the last stage of lung trouble, and Ayers has never really recovered from that blow.

The two papers go to press on the same day, and the rivalry is intense. Early in the day the two foremen each visit the rival plants, ostensibly to borrow some type and a little gasoline, but in reality to count the advertisements and to see how late the rival sheet is going to be. All afternoon the forces work feverishly, reports drifting in occasionally to the effect that over in the other shop they are locking up the forms. The minute the press turns in the Democrat office, Ayers grabs the first paper, folds it and saunters hastily over toward the Argus. Sometimes he meets Simpson half way over with a copy of the Argus in his pocket, and sometimes he gets clear over and has a chance to swell around for a minute with his new-born paper in plain sight, watching the mad foreman lock up the forms. The first paper into the post-office gets distributed first, while the subscribers of the other paper hang around in a state of frenzy and waver in their allegiance in a manner to make the stoutest heart quail. And one of the weekly diversions in Homeburg is watching this race. If it isn't too late in starting, we hang around and make mild bets on the result. One week old man Ayers and his foreman will hurry out from the Democrat office and trot hastily over to the post-office carrying the week's issue of the paper between them in a wash basket. And the next week Simpson and the office devil will beat them to it. Now and then they will both appear at the same time and race side by side, bareheaded, coatless, breathless, and full of hate. I hear a good deal about the exertions to which your papers go to be on the street first with extras, but I'll bet there has never been more voltage in the competition here than there was in Homeburg the night old man Ayers and young Simpson arrived at the post-office door at precisely the same second and got their baskets and themselves in a hopeless jam. Postmaster Flint had to appoint a peace conference to settle the dispute.

Ayers is getting pretty old, and for several years we have been worrying about his future. Since a cruel Government has decided that a newspaper publisher must keep his subscription list paid up or go out of business, times have been pretty hard for Ayers; formerly he could let a subscription account run for ten years and then take a second-hand buggy or a quarter of beef, or a few odd size grindstones on account; but of late he has had to dun us every year, and of course that makes us mad, and we quit his paper with great frequency and vim. I don't know what would have happened to the old man if Wilson hadn't been elected. But that, of course, has settled things for him. He will be our next postmaster. Every one has conceded that except Pash Wade, Emery Billings, Colonel Ackley, and Sim Askinson, who are also candidates. However, old man Ayers's petition is as long as all the rest put together, and when he is appointed and begins to draw down fifteen hundred dollars a year for handing out his own paper to his subscribers, we will sigh with relief, and Simpson's yells will be sweet music in our ears.

If I had my way, I would put a clause in the Constitution giving all third-class postmasterships to third-class editors, anyway. It's the only chance they have of accumulating enough of a surplus to be able to go into a store with their hats on one side and buy things like other people.