ng to collect a
little cash on an advertising account or wheedling a subscriber into
coming out of the misty past and creeping cautiously down a few years
toward the present on his subscription account. If there is anything
which we can't do without and for which we positively object to paying
real money, it is our home newspaper. Sim Bone has a roaring shoe
business and pays cash for his automobiles, but he has often told me
that paying good paper money for advertising would be as wasteful as
eating it. He carries an ad in the _Democrat_ all the year and changes
it about every six months. It's July now, and he is still advertising
bargains in overshoes--but he won't pay any money. Ayers has to trade
the account out, as he has to do with every other advertiser in the
town.

People pity the poor ministers' families who have to live on the
scrambled proceeds of donation parties, but an editor's family in our
parts has even harder luck. I have seen Ayers order two suits of clothes
from a clothier who owed him a big bill and was getting wabbly, and then
pass by the meat market empty-handed, because his advertising account
there was traded out. He told me once that he has taken disk-plows,
flaxseed, magazines, encyclopedias and a new back porch in trade for
advertising and subscriptions, but that he has been wearing an obsolete
pair of spectacles, to his great discomfort, for ten years, because our
local jeweler will not advertise. The doctors in town carry cards in the
paper and owe him large amounts because his family is too healthy to
catch up with them; but it will be two years before either of our local
dentists accumulates a big enough bill to allow Mrs. Ayers to have some
very necessary construction and betterment work, as the railroad folks
say, done to her teeth.

If it weren't for the patent medicine ads, Ayers tells me, he wouldn't
be able to keep afloat for want of ready cash. He says a patent medicine
may be an abomination before the Lord, but that a patent medicine
advertising agent looks to him like a very present help in time of
trouble. The agent comes in and beats him down until he agrees to
publish several hundred yards of notices next to pure reading matter on
all sides for fifteen dollars. But the fifteen dollars is cash--he
doesn't have to take the stuff in trade. And so we are forever running
into such thrilling headlines as, "Horrible Wreck," "Her escape was
simply marvelous," "Worse than the Titani