"For goodness' sakes, Ayers, let that item go and get to press," he says. "Give it to me and I'll read it aloud down-stairs, your whole subscription list's down there waiting."
But we have to wait just the same until the item is set up. Then the foreman locks up the forms and bangs them on the face with his big wooden plane, and he and the old man lug them out into the pressroom while we all hold our breath—sometimes the form explodes on the way and then we don't get the Democrat for three days.
Pretty soon we hear the rattle-te-bang-te-clank-te-clicketty-clang of the old press, and in five minutes more Editor Ayers comes out with an armful of folded papers all fragrant with fresh black ink.
"She's out, boys," he says.
"She's out, boys," he says. Then we grab copies and hurry to spread the news of the birth of another Democrat. We open the sheet and look carefully down the page where old man Ayers generally conceals his local news. For a minute or two there is silence. Then somebody crams his paper into his pocket. "Hmph, nothing in it," he says, and starts home.
He's right, too. Outside of the fact that it has another week of old man Ayers's laborious and worried life in it, it is mighty bare. There isn't enough news in it to cause a thrill in a sewing circle. But after supper at home, when we look it over more carefully and the first hot flush of anticipation has worn off, we do find a lot of information. We find that Miss Ollie Mingle has gone to Paynesville for a two days' visit (aha, that Paynesville young man's folks are going to look her over), and that Mrs. Ackley is visiting her daughter in Ogallala, Neb. (Unless Ackley straightens up, we don't expect her back.) Wimble Horn is erecting a new porch and painting his house. (He must have beaten the bucket shop for once.) We also find that Jedson Bane's peaches are ripe and of the best quality, which fact he has just proven to the editor's entire satisfaction. And that old Mrs. Gastit is feeling very poorly, and Pete Parson, while working on his automobile the other night, contributed a forefinger to the cause of gasoline by poking around in the cogs while the engine was running.
All of this is news and interesting to us; so is the fact that Miss Ri Hawkes is not teaching in the Snyder district school this week, because of a sore toe. While this item does not jar the country quite so extensively as it would if Miss Hawkes belonged to one of your leading New York families, and was employing an eleven-thousand-dollar physician to treat her for gout, it is just as important to Miss Hawkes. And there you have the great keynote of our Homeburg journalism. In the eyes of the Democrat we are all equal.
There are not many of us Homeburgers. We will never see twenty-five hundred again, for as families grow smaller, most of the Illinois towns like Homeburg are contracting slowly in size even while prosperous. The Democrat hasn't above seven hundred subscribers, but every one of those subscribers gets his name in the paper at least once a year, even if it is only a general mention of his patriotism when he pays his annual subscription. No baby born in Homeburg is too humble to get its exact weight heralded to the world through the Democrat. Mrs. Maloney's pneumonia and Banker Payley's quinsy grieve the town in the same paragraph under the heading "Among our sick." The Widow Swanson's ten-mile trip down the line to a neighboring town gets as careful attention as Mrs. Singer's annual pilgrimage to California. In the matter of news we are a pure democracy. The man who buys a new automobile gets no more space than the member of Patrick McQuinn's section crew who scores a clean scoop by digging his potatoes one week ahead of the town. And when the humblest of us lies down in death he does it with the serene consciousness that he will get half a column, anyway, with more if his disease is rare and interesting, and that at the end of the article the city will sympathize with the family in its bereavement. When Mrs. Agnew died of her broken hip she got a column, though she had been financially unable to take the paper for years, while in the same issue Jay Gould got a two-inch obituary in its boiler plate inside.