news. I suppose it's mighty interesting to you New Yorkers to learn
every morning just how much more money you owe on your new subway, and
whether or not the temperature of Mrs. Van Damexpense's second-best
Siberian wolf-hound is still rising. That's what newspapers are for--to
save you the trouble of stepping around and collecting the events of the
day from the back fence. But your papers don't bear down hard enough on
the Homeburg happenings, and that's why they don't suit me.

I don't pretend that our Homeburg paper is the equal of yours in any
particular. The best I can say for it is that it's no worse than it was
ten years ago. It hasn't any three-story type, and you could read it for
years without discovering who was being divorced in San Francisco or
murdered in Chicago. People who depend on it don't know yet that war has
been declared in the Balkans, and they won't hear any more politics
until 1916. All week long I think as little about the paper as all this.
But somehow, when Thursday evening comes around, rain or shine, I step
over to the post-office, and if my paper isn't there, I wait a few
minutes, growing more impatient all the time, and then I drift over to
the door of the _Homeburg Weekly Democrat_ office and join the silent
throng.

Like as not I'll find twenty people there. We don't expect any wild
news. There will probably not be anything in the _Democrat_ when it
comes out, but we want to make sure of it. We don't want to go home
without the paper. We've read it for twenty years, and every week we
open it up and poke through its internals after a sensation that will
stand Homeburg on its ear and split the Methodist church from steeple to
pipe organ. We're as patient as fishers in the Seine, and the fact that
the world has never rocked when the _Democrat_ did come out doesn't
discourage us any.

We want our paper, and so we stand there and grumble. Now and then one
of us stumps up the narrow hallway to the second story where the
_Democrat_ makes its lair, and looks on with an abused air while two
young lady compositors claw around the bottom of the boxes for enough
type to set the last items, and the foreman stuffs the forms of the last
two pages with old boiler plate, medicine ads and anything that will
fill. There isn't any reason for the _Democrat_ being late any more
than there is for the branch accommodation train, which got almost to
town on time once and stood beyond the crossing for twenty m