grist that
keeps the mill going.

As the merest incident of the daily grind, it came to the office that
the bank cashier, whose retirement we announced with half a column of
regret, was caught $3500 short, after twenty years of faithful service,
and that his wife sold the homestead to make his shortage good. We know
the week that the widower sets out, and we hear with remarkable accuracy
just when he has been refused by this particular widow or that, and,
when he begins on a school-teacher, the whole office has candy and cigar
and mince pie bets on the result, with the odds on the widower five to
one. We know the woman who is always sent for when a baby comes to town,
and who has laid more good people of the community in their shrouds than
all the undertakers. We know the politician who gets five dollars a day
for his "services" at the polls, the man who takes three dollars and the
man who will work for the good of the cause in the precious hope of a
blessed reward at some future county convention. To know these things is
not a matter of pride; it is not a source of annoyance or shame; it is
part of the business.

Though our loathed but esteemed contemporary, the _Statesman_, speaks of
our town as "this city," and calls the marshal "chief of police," we are
none the less a country town. Like hundreds of its kind, our little
daily newspaper is equipped with typesetting machines and is printed
from a web perfecting press, yet it is only a country newspaper, and
knowing this we refuse to put on city airs. Of course we print the
afternoon Associated Press report on the first page, under formal heads
and with some pretence of dignity, but that first page is the parlour of
the paper, as it is of most of its contemporaries, and in the other
pages they and we go around in our shirt sleeves, calling people by
their first names; teasing the boys and girls good-naturedly; tickling
the pompous members of the village family with straws from time to time,
and letting out the family secrets of the community without much regard
for the feelings of the supercilious.

Nine or ten thousand people in our town go to bed on this kind of mental
pabulum, as do country-town dwellers all over the United States, and
although we do not claim that it is helpful, we do contend that it does
not hurt them. Certainly by poking mild fun at the shams--the town
pharisees--we make it more difficult to maintain the class lines which
the pretenders would