They say that when Editor Ayers first came to Homeburg some forty years ago he was a bright young man with a great rush of words from the pen, and that he had a dapper air and was generally admired. The _Democrat_ contained about a page of solid editorial opinion each week on everything, from the tariff to the duty of Russia, in whatever crisis was then pending, and people swore by the paper and didn't make up their opinions until they had read it. But times have changed. We don't stand in awe of the _Democrat_ any more. Most of us laugh at it, even those of us who are not financiers enough to keep our subscriptions called up. We call it the "Weekly Gimlet" and the "Poorly Democrat," and we make bright remarks to old man Ayers when he asks us for news and tell him that he ought to turn the paper inside out so that we can read the boiler plate first and not have to wade through his stuff. But he doesn't object. Time and toil and the worry of keeping cash enough on hand to pay the expressman who dumps his ready prints on the floor each Wednesday and refuses to budge until he has collected $3.24 have taken the pepper out of him. He doesn't write editorials any more except on the week following a national election, and they are affairs of duty which always begin: "Another election has come and gone and the party of Jackson--" He has made a living for forty years and has sent two sons through college from the _Democrat_, and the effort has taken the fight out of him. I never saw him resent a joke but once. That was when Pelty Amthorne told him that his wife considered the _Democrat_ to be the best paper she had ever seen. He let Ayers burst a couple of buttons from his vest in his swelling pride before he explained that the _Democrat_, when cut in two, exactly fitted his wife's pantry shelves, and that she didn't have to trim it a bit. The old man turned on his heel without a word and that week he kindled his old-time fires and wrote the following for the local page: