ere a week straightening matters up. Figures
didn't mean anything to Mehronay. When the bank failed, he tried to
write something about it, but mixed the assets and the liabilities so
hopelessly that we had to keep him busy with other things, so that he
would have no time to touch the bank story. They used to say around town
that when he laid down a piece of money, however large, on a store
counter he never waited for his change, but be it said to the credit of
most of the merchants that they would save it for Mehronay and give it
to him on his next visit to the store, when he would be as joyful as a
child.

Gradually he left the back room and became a fixture in the front
office. He wrote locals and editorials and helped with the advertising,
drawing for this the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a week, which
should have kept him like a prince; but it did not--though what he did
with his money no one knew. He bought no new clothes, and never buttoned
those he had. Before sending him out on the street in the morning,
someone in the office had to button him up, and if it was a gala
day--say circus day, or the day of a big political pow-wow--we had to
put a clean paper collar on Mehronay above his brown wool shirt and
shove out the dents in his derby hat--a procedure which he called
"making a butterfly of fashion out of an honest workin' man." He slept
in the press-room, on a bed which he rolled up and stowed behind the
press by day, and in the evening he consorted with the goddess of
nicotine--as he called his plug tobacco--and put in his time at his desk
with a lead pencil and a pad of white paper writing copy for the next
day's issue. Nothing delighted him so much as a fictitious personage or
situation which held real relations with local events or home people.
One of the best of his many inventions was a new reporter who, according
to Mehronay's legend, had just quit work for a circus where he had been
employed writing the posters. Mehronay's joy was to write up a local
occurrence and pretend that the circus poster-writer had written it and
that we had been greatly bothered to restrain his adjectives. A few days
after the Sinclair-Handy wedding--a particularly gorgeous affair in one
of the stone churches, which had been written up by the bride's mother,
as the whole town knew, in a most disgusting manner--Mehronay sat
chuckling in his corner, writing something which he put on the copy-hook
before going out on his b