one of latitude.
But"--and he drawled out the word mockingly--"but I guess if the Lord
had wanted me to make a town here he would have given me a different
kind of liver!" He slapped his knees as he sighed: "This is a funny
world, and the more you see of it the funnier it gets." The old man
grinned complacently at the ceiling for a minute, and before getting out
of his chair kicked his shoe-heels together merrily, wiped his glasses
as he rose, put his bundle of papers under his arm, and left the office
whistling an old, old-fashioned tune.

XI

The Casting Out of Jimmy Myers

It seemed a cruel thing to do, but we had to do it. For ours is
ordinarily a quiet office. We have never had a libel suit. We have had
fewer fights than most newspaper offices have, and while it hardly may
be said that we strive to please, still in the main we try to get on
with the people, and tell them as much truth as they are entitled to for
ten cents a week. Naturally, we do our best to get up a sprightly paper,
and in that the Myers boy had our idea exactly. He was industrious; more
than that, he tried with all his might to exercise his best judgment,
and no one could say that he was careless; yet everyone around the
office admitted that he was unlucky. He was one of those persons who
always have slivers on their doors, or tar on the knocker, when
opportunity comes their way; so his stay in the office was marked by a
series of seismic disturbances in the paper that came from under his
desk, and yet he was in no way to blame for them.

We took him from the college at the edge of town. He had been running
the college paper for a year, and knew the merchants around town fairly
well; and, since he was equipped as far as education went, he seemed to
be a likely sort of a boy for reporter and advertising solicitor.

One of the first things that happened to him was a mistake in an item
about the opera house. He said that a syndicate had taken a lien on it.
What he meant was a lease, and as he got the item from a man who didn't
know the difference, and as the boy stuck to it that the man had said
lien and not lease, we did not charge that up to him. A few days later
he wrote for a town photographer a paid local criticising someone who
was going around the county peddling picture-frames and taking orders
for enlarged pictures. That was not so bad, but it turned out that the
pedlar was a woman, and she came with a rawhide and camped in th