ccomplishments.

"What's the use?" asked the girl. "Mother does everything for me. She
always says she'd rather do it than teach me how."

"Don't you take to reading?" asked Mr. Opp.

"Oh, yes," she said; "I used to read all the time down at school; but
there never is anything to read up here."

The editor-elect peopled the country with similar cases, and he
immediately saw himself as a public benefactor supplying starved
subscribers with a bountiful repast of weekly news.

"Won't you sit down?" asked the girl, interrupting his reflections. "I
don't know what can be keeping mother."

Mr. Opp looked about for a chair, but there was none. Then he glanced at
his companion, and saw that she was holding aside her pink skirt and
evidently offering him a seat beside her in the hammock. He advanced a
step, retreated, then weakly capitulated. Sitting very rigid, nursing
his hat on his knees, and inserting his forefinger between his neck and
his collar as if to breathe better, he remarked that it was getting
warmer all the time.

"This isn't anything to what it will be later," said the girl; "it keeps
on getting hotter and dustier all the time. I don't believe there's such
a stupid, poky, little old place anywhere else in the world. You ought
to be mighty glad you don't live here."

Mr. Opp cleared his throat with some dignity. "I expect to remain here
permanent now. I--well--the truth is, I have decided to operate a
newspaper here."

"No!" cried the girl, incredulously. "Not in the Cove!"

"In the Cove," repeated Mr. Opp, firmly. "There's great need here for a
live, enterprising newspaper. It's a virgin field, you might say. There
never was a place that needed a public voice more. My paper is going to
be a voice that hears all sides of a question; it's going to appeal to
the aged and the young and all them that lies between."

"It will be mighty grand for us!" said his companion, with interest.
"When is it going to start?"

Definite plans being decidedly nebulous, Mr. Opp wisely confined himself
to generalities. He touched casually on his remarkable fitness for the
work, his wide experience, his worldly knowledge. He hinted that in time
he expected to venture into even deeper literary waters--poetry, and a
novel, perhaps. As he talked, he realized that for the second time that
day he was looked upon with approval. Being accepted at his own estimate
proved a new and exhilarating sensation.

It was pleasant on the