That Anthy was deeply troubled on that summer morning I saw plainly when the Captain came, in the keen glance she gave him. He, too, seemed somehow changed, so unlike himself as to be almost gloomy. He gave me a sepulchral, "Good morning, sir," and sat down at his desk without even lighting his pipe. Something tremendous, I could feel, was taking place there in the printing-office, and I said to Anthy--we had been talking about the paragraphs I brought in: "What's been happening to the _Star_ since I was here before?" "You've discovered it, too!" she said with a whimsical smile. "Well, we're just now in process of being modernized." At this I heard Fergus snort behind me. "Bein' busted, you mean," said he. Fergus, besides being temperamentally unable to contain his opinions, had been so long the prop of the mechanical fortunes of the _Star_ that he was a privileged character. "I knew something was the matter," I said. "As I was coming in I felt like saying, 'Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishmun.'" "Plain Yankee this time," said Fergus. "Now, Fergus!" exclaimed Anthy severely. "You see," she continued, "we positively had to do something. The paper has been going downhill ever since my father's death. Father knew how to make it pay, even with half the families in town taking the cheap city dailies. But times are changing, and we've got to modernize or perish." While she spoke with conviction, her words lacked enthusiasm, and they had, moreover, a certain cut-and-dried sound. "Times are changing. Modernize or perish!" Anthy did not know it, of course, but she was living at the psychological moment in our history when the whole country was turning for salvation to that finished product, that perfect flower, of our institutions, the Practical Business Man. Was a city sick, or a church declining in its membership, or a college suffering from slow starvation, or a newspaper down with neurasthenia, why, call in a Practical Business Man. Let him administer up-to-date remedies; let him hustle, push, advertise. It was thus, as an example of what the historian loves to call "remote causes," that Mr. Ed Smith came to Hempfield and the _Star_. He was a graduate of small-town journalism in its most progressive guises, and if any one was ever entitled to the degree of P. B. M. _cum laude_, it was Ed Smith. He had come at Anthy's call--after having made certain eminently sound and satisfying financial arrangements. When it came finally to the issue, Anthy had seen that the only alternative to the extinction of the _Star_ was some desperate and drastic remedy. And Ed Smith was that desperate and drastic remedy. "I felt," she said to me, "that I must do everything I could to keep the _Star_ alive. My father devoted all his life to it, and then, there was Uncle Newt--how could Uncle Newt live without a newspaper?"