e was a privileged character.

"I knew something was the matter," I said. "As I was coming in I felt
like saying, 'Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishmun.'"

"Plain Yankee this time," said Fergus.

"Now, Fergus!" exclaimed Anthy severely. "You see," she continued, "we
positively had to do something. The paper has been going downhill ever
since my father's death. Father knew how to make it pay, even with half
the families in town taking the cheap city dailies. But times are
changing, and we've got to modernize or perish."

While she spoke with conviction, her words lacked enthusiasm, and they
had, moreover, a certain cut-and-dried sound. "Times are changing.
Modernize or perish!"

Anthy did not know it, of course, but she was living at the
psychological moment in our history when the whole country was turning
for salvation to that finished product, that perfect flower, of our
institutions, the Practical Business Man. Was a city sick, or a church
declining in its membership, or a college suffering from slow
starvation, or a newspaper down with neurasthenia, why, call in a
Practical Business Man. Let him administer up-to-date remedies; let him
hustle, push, advertise.

It was thus, as an example of what the historian loves to call "remote
causes," that Mr. Ed Smith came to Hempfield and the _Star_. He was a
graduate of small-town journalism in its most progressive guises, and if
any one was ever entitled to the degree of P. B. M. _cum laude_, it was
Ed Smith.

He had come at Anthy's call--after having made certain eminently sound
and satisfying financial arrangements. When it came finally to the
issue, Anthy had seen that the only alternative to the extinction of the
_Star_ was some desperate and drastic remedy. And Ed Smith was that
desperate and drastic remedy.

"I felt," she said to me, "that I must do everything I could to keep the
_Star_ alive. My father devoted all his life to it, and then, there was
Uncle Newt--how could Uncle Newt live without a newspaper?"

I did not know until long afterward what the sacrifice had meant to
Anthy. It meant not only a surrender of all her immediate hopes of
completing her college work, but she was compelled to risk everything
she had. First, she had borrowed all the money she could raise on the
old home, and with this she paid off the accumulated debts of the
_Star_. With the remainder, which Ed Smith spoke of as Working Capital,
she plunged into the unkno