“I might give a good paper my support,” said one, a long, lean, sanctimonious man who looked as though he had narrow notions and a firm determination to rule in his small world. “But it’s mighty hard to make a paper that would suit this community. We’re religious and hard-working here, and we like the things that interest religious and hard-working people. Course if it was run right it might pay pretty well, but I dunno as ’twould neither. You never can tell.” I saw that he would be one hard customer to deal with anyhow. If there were many like him—— The poor, thin-blooded, calculating world which he represented frightened me. “How much advertising do you think you could give to a paper that was ‘run’ right?” “Well, that depends,” he said gloomily and disinterestedly. “I’d have to see how it was run first. Some weeks I might give more than others.” Michaelson nudged me and we left. “I forgot to tell you,” he said, “that he’s a Baptist and a Republican. He’d expect you to run it in favor of those institutions if you got his support. But all the men around town won’t feel that way.” In the dusty back room of a drugstore we found a chemist who did not know whether a weekly newspaper was of any value to him, and could not contribute more than fifty cents a week in advertising if it were. The proprietor of the village hotel, a thick-set, red-faced man with the air of a country evil-doer, said that he did not see that a local newspaper was particularly valuable to him. He might advertise, but it would be more as a favor than anything else. I began to sum up the difficulties of our position. We should be handicapped, to begin with, by a wretched printing outfit. We should be beholden to a company of small, lean-living, narrow men who would take offense at the least show of individuality and cut us off entirely from support. We should have to busy ourselves gathering trivial items of news, dunning hard-working, indifferent farmers for small amounts of money, and reduce all our thoughts and ambitions to the measure of this narrow world. I saw myself dying by inches. It gave me the creeps. Youth and hope were calling. “I don’t see this,” I said to myself. “It’s horrible. I should die.” To Michaelson I said: “Suppose we give up our canvassing for today?” “We might as well,” he replied. “There’s a paper over at Bowling Green for sale, and it’s a better paper. We might go over in a day or two and look at it. We might as well go home now.”