But here I was listening to Michaelson’s silly drivel and wondering if a country newspaper might not offer an escape from the humdrum and clamlike existence into which I seemed to have fallen. From December on this cheerful mediocrity, of about the warmth and intelligence of a bright collie, was telling me daily how wonderful I was and that I “ought to get out of here and into something which would really profit me and get me somewhere”—into the editorship of a country weekly! What jocular fates trifled with my sense of the reasonable or the ridiculous at this time I do not know, but I was interested—largely, I presume, because I was too wandering and nebulous to think of anything else to do. This cheerful soul finally ended by indicating a paper—the Weekly Something of Grand Rapids, Ohio (not Michigan), near his father’s farm (see pp. 247-255, _A Hoosier Holiday_), which, according to him, was just the thing and should offer a complete solution for all our material and social aspirations in this world. By way of this paper, or some other of its kind, one might rise to any height, political or social, state or national. I might become a state assemblyman from my county, a senator, a congressman, or United States senator! When you owned a country paper you were an independent person (imagine the editor of a country paper being independent of the conventions of his community!), not a poor harried scribe on a city paper, uncertain from week to week whether you were to be retained any longer. There were the delights of a country life, the sweet simplicity of a country town, away from the noise and streets and gaudy, shabby nothingness of a great city. ... As I listened to the picture of his native town, his father’s farm, the cows, pigs, chickens, how we could go there and live for a while, my imagination mounted to a heaven of unadulterated success, peace, joy. In my mind I had already rented or bought a small vine-clad cottage in Grand Rapids, Ohio, where, according to Michaelson, was a wonderful sparkling rapids to be seen glimmering in the moonlight, a railroad which went into Toledo within an hour, fertile farmland all about, both gas and oil recently struck, making the farmers prosperous and therefore in the mood for a first-class newspaper such as we would edit. Imagine sparkling rapids glimmering in the moonlight listed as a financial asset of a country paper! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER LIV