rtin's Dry-Goods Emporium, where all the
clerks from the stores around the Square came to play checkers or look
on at the game. (This was the club during the day; in the evening the
club and the game removed to the drug, book, and wall-paper store on
the corner.) At supper, the new arrival and his probable purposes were
discussed over every table in the town. Upon inquiry, he had informed
Judd Bennett, the driver of the omnibus, that he had come to stay.
Naturally, such a declaration caused a sensation, as people did not come
to Plattville to live, except through the inadvertency of being born
there. In addition, the young man's appearance and attire were reported
to be extraordinary. Many of the curious, among them most of the
marriageable females of the place, took occasion to pass and repass the
sign of the "Carlow County Herald" during the evening.

Meanwhile, the stranger was seated in the dingy office upstairs with
his head bowed low on his arms. Twilight stole through the dirty
window-panes and faded into darkness. Night filled the room. He did not
move. The young man from the East had bought the "Herald" from an
agent; had bought it without ever having been within a hundred miles of
Plattville. He had vastly overpaid for it. Moreover, the price he had
paid for it was all the money he had in the world.

The next morning he went bitterly to work. He hired a compositor from
Rouen, a young man named Parker, who set type all night long and helped
him pursue advertisements all day. The citizens shook their heads
pessimistically. They had about given up the idea that the "Herald"
could ever amount to anything, and they betrayed an innocent, but
caustic, doubt of ability in any stranger.

One day the new editor left a note on his door; "Will return in fifteen
minutes."

Mr. Rodney McCune, a politician from the neighboring county of Gaines,
happening to be in Plattville on an errand to his henchmen, found the
note, and wrote beneath the message the scathing inquiry, "Why?"

When he discovered this addendum, the editor smiled for the first time
since his advent, and reported the incident in his next issue, using the
rubric, "Why Has the 'Herald' Returned to Life?" as a text for a rousing
editorial on "honesty in politics," a subject of which he already knew
something. The political district to which Carlow belonged was governed
by a limited number of gentlemen whose wealth was ever on the increase;
and "honesty in po