ed a little back and gave a perfect imitation
of the familiar figure of our town druggist. "'Mr. Tole,' I said, 'the
_Star_ is going to print the poems of Hempfield this week. Haven't you a
favourite poem you can put in?' Well, you should have seen the old
fellow grin. 'Yes,' says he, 'I've got a favour-ite poem.' I asked him
what it was. He kept on smiling, and finally he said:

'I keep a plaster, in case of disaster,
And also a pill, in case of an ill.'"

Nort shook with laughter.

"George! I wish you could have heard him repeat it: 'And also a pi-ll in
case of an i-ll.'"

He had the whole office laughing with him.

"I say, let's put it in the _Star_! 'John Tole's Favourite Poem,' What
do you say, Miss Doane?"

He stood there such a figure of irresponsible and contagious youth as I
can never forget.

"Tole hasn't favoured the _Star_ with any advertising for over twenty
years," observed the Captain.

"We'll advertise him, anyhow," said Nort.

And so it went in, at a special place in the middle of the page. Fergus
grumbled and growled, of course, but was really more interested and
excited, I think, than he had been before in years. "Fergus's great
idea," "Fergus's brilliant thought," was the way Nort referred to the
printing of the poetry. For two people so utterly unlike, Fergus and
Nort got an extraordinary amount of amusement out of each other.

In order to make room for the poetry something else, of course, had to
be left out, and partly by chance and partly through the antagonism of
the Captain, we omitted two paragraphs that Ed Smith had left on the
stone for use in the next issue of the paper. One was a flattering
comment on the new electric light company that was about to supply
Hempfield and other nearby towns with current.

"Seems to me," said Fergus, "we've had enough electric light news for a
while."

"Cut her out, then," said Nort, as though he owned the paper.

The other was a cleverly worded paragraph about the candidacy of a
certain D. J. McCullum for the legislature. When the Captain saw it he
snorted with indignation.

"A regular old Democrat!" he exclaimed. "Now what was Ed Smith thinking
of--putting a piece like that in the paper?"

We little knew what consequences were to follow upon a matter so
apparently trivial as the omission of these few sticks of type from the
_Star_.

At last the forms were locked, and Nort and Fergus carried them over to
the press. It was an excitin