People pity the poor ministers' families who have to live on the scrambled proceeds of donation parties, but an editor's family in our parts has even harder luck. I have seen Ayers order two suits of clothes from a clothier who owed him a big bill and was getting wabbly, and then pass by the meat market empty-handed, because his advertising account there was traded out. He told me once that he has taken disk-plows, flaxseed, magazines, encyclopedias and a new back porch in trade for advertising and subscriptions, but that he has been wearing an obsolete pair of spectacles, to his great discomfort, for ten years, because our local jeweler will not advertise. The doctors in town carry cards in the paper and owe him large amounts because his family is too healthy to catch up with them; but it will be two years before either of our local dentists accumulates a big enough bill to allow Mrs. Ayers to have some very necessary construction and betterment work, as the railroad folks say, done to her teeth. If it weren't for the patent medicine ads, Ayers tells me, he wouldn't be able to keep afloat for want of ready cash. He says a patent medicine may be an abomination before the Lord, but that a patent medicine advertising agent looks to him like a very present help in time of trouble. The agent comes in and beats him down until he agrees to publish several hundred yards of notices next to pure reading matter on all sides for fifteen dollars. But the fifteen dollars is cash--he doesn't have to take the stuff in trade. And so we are forever running into such thrilling headlines as, "Horrible Wreck," "Her escape was simply marvelous," "Worse than the Titanic Disaster," in the _Democrat's_ local page. And then we exclaim: "Hurray! Real news at last," and prowl eagerly down the items only to find that the horrible wreck was a citizen of Swamp Hollow upon whom a wonderful cure was effected; that "Her escape" was from inflammatory rheumatism by the aid of Gettem's Dead Shot Specific, and that the Titanic Disaster is eclipsed annually by the sad ends of thousands of people who neglect to take Palaver's Punk Pills. It always makes us mad, but we can't kick. If it weren't for the patent medicine people, we would have to pay for the _Democrat_ all by ourselves.