It's not much of a trick to go into a strange town and learn to navigate from hotel to hotel, but it's a hopeless task to try to find your way around a strange newspaper. Takes about two years to learn to read a strange newspaper skilfully, anyway, and find your way through it without banging into the want ads when you want to find the editorials, and tripping over the poets' column when you are hunting for the crop reports. You've been buying a paper every time you turned a corner for the last week, Jim--you New Yorkers seem to have to have a paper about as often as a whale needs a new lungful of air--and I've taken a hasty look at all of them, but when I get home I am going to ask my wife what has happened in the U. S. while I've been away from Homeburg. Outside of the eternal Mexican case, I don't seem to have discovered a thing. Mind you, I don't blame your papers for bearing down hard on the local news. I suppose it's mighty interesting to you New Yorkers to learn every morning just how much more money you owe on your new subway, and whether or not the temperature of Mrs. Van Damexpense's second-best Siberian wolf-hound is still rising. That's what newspapers are for--to save you the trouble of stepping around and collecting the events of the day from the back fence. But your papers don't bear down hard enough on the Homeburg happenings, and that's why they don't suit me. I don't pretend that our Homeburg paper is the equal of yours in any particular. The best I can say for it is that it's no worse than it was ten years ago. It hasn't any three-story type, and you could read it for years without discovering who was being divorced in San Francisco or murdered in Chicago. People who depend on it don't know yet that war has been declared in the Balkans, and they won't hear any more politics until 1916. All week long I think as little about the paper as all this. But somehow, when Thursday evening comes around, rain or shine, I step over to the post-office, and if my paper isn't there, I wait a few minutes, growing more impatient all the time, and then I drift over to the door of the _Homeburg Weekly Democrat_ office and join the silent throng. Like as not I'll find twenty people there. We don't expect any wild news. There will probably not be anything in the _Democrat_ when it comes out, but we want to make sure of it. We don't want to go home without the paper. We've read it for twenty years, and every week we open it up and poke through its internals after a sensation that will stand Homeburg on its ear and split the Methodist church from steeple to pipe organ. We're as patient as fishers in the Seine, and the fact that the world has never rocked when the _Democrat_ did come out doesn't discourage us any.