aid Banks. "We'll show you. Come down to the car while
I send about forty telegrams, and then we'll fix you, Mister Askinson."

Which they did that night, while most of the town looked on. The next
fall Banks came back and stayed three days, and his conduct and that of
his old companions in crime set an example to our younger generation
which didn't wear off for years. They went out orchard robbing in an
automobile, and Banks said he never realized before the wonder of modern
conveniences.

VII

THE HOMEBURG WEEKLY DEMOCRAT

_Which Swamps the Post-Office Every Friday_

No, Jim, as I have already said about thirty-four times this week, I
don't care for a paper. Don't buy one for me. I could read your New York
papers for twenty-four hours at a stretch, and at the end of the time I
would have to stop some good-natured looking chap and ask what the news
was. It's all there, I know, but I don't seem able to find it. Even the
Chicago baseball scores are hidden in the blamed things. Instead of
putting them first, the way they ought to, they stick them down at the
end of the page. As for the editorial pages, I might as well go to
Labrador and hunt for personal friends as to read them. If there's
anything that makes a stranger feel about ten thousand miles from home,
with the cars not running, it is to get into the editorial page of an
unknown newspaper and try to sit in with the family discussions. It
makes me feel like a man who has gotten into a reunion of the Old
Settlers' Association of Zanzibar by mistake.

It's not much of a trick to go into a strange town and learn to navigate
from hotel to hotel, but it's a hopeless task to try to find your way
around a strange newspaper. Takes about two years to learn to read a
strange newspaper skilfully, anyway, and find your way through it
without banging into the want ads when you want to find the editorials,
and tripping over the poets' column when you are hunting for the crop
reports. You've been buying a paper every time you turned a corner for
the last week, Jim--you New Yorkers seem to have to have a paper about
as often as a whale needs a new lungful of air--and I've taken a hasty
look at all of them, but when I get home I am going to ask my wife what
has happened in the U. S. while I've been away from Homeburg. Outside of
the eternal Mexican case, I don't seem to have discovered a thing.

Mind you, I don't blame your papers for bearing down hard on the local