come yet, and Anthy and Fergus and the old
Captain were positively the only ones there.

But Nort, however impatient he may be getting, will have to wait even a
little while yet, for notable events were to occur in the
printing-office just before he arrived, without which, indeed, he never
could have arrived at all. If it had not been for the ploughing and
harrowing of Ed Smith, painful as it was to that ancient and sedate
institution, the Hempfield _Star_, there never would have been any
harvest for Norton Carr, nor for me, nor for Anthy. So good may come
even out of evil.

As I narrate these preliminary events, however, you will do well to keep
in your thought a picture of Nort going about his pleasures--I fear, at
that time, somewhat unsteadily--in the great city, not knowing in the
least that chance, assisted by a troublesome organ within called a soul,
was soon to deposit him in the open streets of a town he had never
heard of in all his life, but which was our own familiar town of
Hempfield.

The thought of Nort looking rather mistily down the common--he was
standing just in front of the Congregational Church--and asking, "What
town am I in, anyhow?" lingers in my memory as one of the amusing things
I have known.

Late in June I began to feel distinctly the premonitory rumblings and
grumblings of the storm which was now rapidly gathering around the
_Star_. It was a very clever Frenchman, I believe--though not clever
enough to make me remember his name--who, upon observing certain
disturbances in the farther reaches of the solar system, calculated by
sheer mathematical genius that there was an enormous planet, infinitely
distant from the sun, which nobody had yet discovered.

It was thus by certain signs of commotion in one of its issues that I
recognized a portentous but undiscovered Neptune, which was plainly
disturbing the course of the _Star_. A big new advertisement stared at
me from the middle of the first page, and there was a certain crisp
quality in some of the reading notices--from which the letters "adv"
had been suspiciously omitted--the origin of which I could not
recognize. The second week the change was even more marked. There were
several smart new headings: "Jots and Tittles from Littleton," I
remember, was one of them, and even the sanctity of the editorial column
had been invaded with an extraordinary production quite foreign to the
Captain's pen. It was entitled:

"_All Together Now! Bo