Dress-Goods Catalogue

As the Dinner Hour Grew Near She Raged--So the Servants said--Whenever
the Telephone Rang

"Jim Purdy, Taken the Day He Left for the Army"

He Advertised the Fact that He was a Good Hater by Showing Callers at
His Office His Barrel

He Likes to Sit in the Old Swayback Swivel-Chair and Tell Us His Theory
of the Increase in the Rainfall

And Camped in the Office for Two Days, Looking for Jimmy

Reverend Milligan Came in with a Church Notice

A Desert Scorpion, Outcast by Society and Proud of it

"He Made a Lot of Money and Blew it in"

Went About Town with His Cigar Pointing Toward his Hat-Brim

The Traveling Men on the Veranda Craned Their Necks to Watch Her Out of
Sight

Counting the Liars and Scoundrels and Double-Dealers and Villains Who
Pass

IN OUR TOWN

I

Scribes and Pharisees

Ours is a little town in that part of the country called the West by
those who live east of the Alleghanies, and referred to lovingly as
"back East" by those who dwell west of the Rockies. It is a country town
where, as the song goes, "you know everybody and they all know you," and
the country newspaper office is the social clearing-house.

When a man has published a paper in a country community for many years,
he knows his town and its people, their strength and their weakness,
their joys and their sorrows, their failings and their prosperity--or if
he does not know these things, he is on the road to failure, for this
knowledge must be the spirit of his paper. The country editor and his
reporters sooner or later pass upon everything that interests their
town.

In our little newspaper office we are all reporters, and we know many
intimate things about our people that we do not print. We know, for
instance, which wives will not let their husbands endorse other men's
notes at the banks. We know about the row the Baptists are having to get
rid of the bass singer in their choir, who has sung at funerals for
thirty years, until it has reached a point where all good Baptists dread
death on account of his lugubrious profundo. Perhaps we should take this
tragedy to heart, but we know that the Methodists are having the same
trouble with their soprano, who "flats"--and has flatted for ten years,
and is too proud to quit the choir "under fire" as she calls it; and we
remember what a time the Congregationalists had getting rid of their
tenor. So that choir troubles are to us only a part of the