one and manner, which made clear her
position as a person of worth, dealing with the lowest of her inferiors.
She went on, not pausing:

"I thought being as I was related to you, and all the family and
everybody else is goin' to haf to read your ole newspaper, anyway it'd
be a good thing if what was printed in it wasn't _all_ a disgrace to the
family, because the name of our family's got mixed up with this
newspaper;--so here!"

Thus speaking, she took the poem from her pocket and with dignity held
it forth to her cousin.

"What's that?" Herbert inquired, not moving a hand. He was but an
amateur, yet already enough of an editor to be suspicious.

"It's a poem," Florence said. "I don't know whether I exackly ought to
have it in your ole newspaper or not, but on account of the family's
sake I guess I better. Here, take it."

Herbert at once withdrew a few steps, placing his hands behind him.
"Listen here," he said;--"you think we got time to read a lot o' nothin'
in your ole hand-writin' that nobody can read anyhow, and then go and
toil and moil to print it on our printin'-press? I guess we got work
enough printin' what we write for our newspaper our own selves! My
goodness, Florence, I _told_ you this isn't any child's play!"

For the moment, Florence appeared to be somewhat baffled. "Well," she
said. "Well, you better put this poem in your ole newspaper if you want
to have anyhow one thing in it that won't make everybody sick that reads
it."

"_I_ won't do it!" Herbert said decisively.

"What you take us for?" his partner added.

"All right, then," Florence responded. "I'll go and tell Uncle Joseph
and he'll take this printing-press back."

"He will not take it back. I already did tell him how you kept pokin'
around, tryin' to _run_ everything, and how we just worried our lives
out tryin' to keep you away. He said he bet it was a hard job; that's
what Uncle Joseph said! So go on, tell him anything you want to. You
don't get your ole poem in _our_ newspaper!"

"Not if she lived to be two hunderd years old!" Henry Rooter added.
Then he had an afterthought. "Not unless she pays for it."

"How do you mean?" Herbert asked, puzzled by this codicil.

Now Henry's brow had become corrugated with no little professional
impressiveness. "You know what we were talkin' about this morning?" he
said. "How the right way to run our newspaper, we ought to have some
advertisements in it and everything? Well, we want money,