d gone in at the
grocery stores, made a familiar resort of the gunsmith shop, and
visited the post office, but had never really seen the printing-office
at all.

[Illustration: It sat there in its garden and watched with mild interest
the hasty world go by]

Like most things or people really worth knowing, the printing-office is
of a retiring disposition. It is an old building, once a dwelling-house,
which stands somewhat back from the street, with a quaint old garden
around it. An ancient picket fence, nicked and whittled by a generation
or so of boys who should have known better, guards its privacy. At the
tip of the low cornice is a weatherbeaten bird house, a miniature Greek
Parthenon, where the wrens built their nests. Larger and more
progressive business buildings had crowded up to the street lines on
both sides of it, and yet it managed to preserve somehow an air of
ancient gentility. The gate sagged on its hinges, the chimney had lost a
brick or two, but it sat there in its garden and watched with mild
interest the hasty world go by.

I wondered, that morning, why the peculiar air of the place had never
before touched me. I paused a moment, looking in at it with such a
feeling of expectancy as I cannot well describe. I did not know what
adventure might there befall me. At any moment I half expected to see my
imagined old fellow appear on the doorstep and cry out, half ironically,
half explosively:

"Fudge!" Upon which, undoubtedly, I should have disappeared into thin
air.

There being no sign of life, for it was still very early in the morning,
I opened the gate and went in. Over the front door stretched a
weatherbeaten sign bearing these words in large letters:

THE HEMPFIELD STAR

Under this name there was a line of smaller lettering, so faded that one
could not easily read it from the street. But as I stood now at the
doorway and looked up I could make it out--and it came to me, I cannot
tell with what charm, like the far-off echo of ancient laughter:

_Hitch Your Wagon to the Star_

Below this legend in fresher paint, bearing indeed the evidence of
repainting, for many are the vicissitudes of a country newspaper, was
the name of the firm:

Doane & Doane

I went up the steps to the little porch and looked in at the doorway. I
shall never forget the odour of printer's ink which came warmly to my
nostrils, the never-to-be-forgotten odour of printer's ink, sweeter than
the spices of Araby, more a