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