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.
Whe