establish. Possibly by printing the news of
everything that happens, suppressing nothing "on account of the
respectability of the parties concerned," we may prevent some evil-doers
from going on with their plans, but this is mere conjecture, and we do
not set it down to our credit. What we maintain is that in printing our
little country dailies, we, the scribes, from one end of the world to
the other, get more than our share of fun out of life as we go along,
and pass as much of it on to our neighbours as we can spare.

[Illustration: Suppressing nothing "on account of the respectability of
the parties concerned"]

Because we live in country towns, where the only car-gongs we hear are
on the baker's waggon, and where the horses in the fire department work
on the streets, is no reason why city dwellers should assume that we are
natives. We have no dialect worth recording--save that some of us
Westerners burr our "r's" a little or drop an occasional final "g." But
you will find that all the things advertised in the backs of the
magazines are in our houses, and that the young men in our towns walking
home at midnight, with their coats over their arms, whistle the same
popular airs that lovelorn boys are whistling in New York, Portland, San
Francisco or New Orleans that same fine evening. Our girls are those
pretty, reliant, well-dressed young women whom you see at the summer
resorts from Coronado Beach to Buzzard's Bay. In the fall and winter
these girls fill the colleges of the East and the State universities of
the West. Those wholesome, frank, good-natured people whom you met last
winter at the Grand Canyons and who told you of the funny performance of
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" in Yiddish at the People's Theatre on the East Side
in New York, and insisted that you see the totem pole in Seattle; and
then take a cottage for a month at Catalina Island; who gave you the tip
about Abson's quaint little beefsteak chop-house up an alley in Chicago,
who told you of Mrs. O'Hagan's second-hand furniture shop in Charleston,
where you can get real colonial stuff dirt cheap--those people are our
leading citizens, who run the bank or the dry-goods store or the
flour-mill. At our annual arts and crafts show we have on exhibition
loot from the four corners of the earth, and the club woman who has not
heard it whispered around in our art circles that Mr. Sargent is
painting too many portraits lately, and that a certain long-legged model
whos