In New York an auto means comfort and pleasure and advertisement, like a fur-lined overcoat with a Persian lamb collar. But in Homeburg it means a lot more. It keeps us busy and happy and full of conversation and debate. It pulls our old, retired farmers out of their shells and makes them yell for improvements. It unbuckles our tight-wads and gives our ingenious young loafers something to do. It promotes town pride, and it keeps our money circulating so fast that every one has a chance to grasp a chunk as it goes by. It has made us so independent of railroads that we feel now when buying a ticket to Chicago as if we were helping the poor old line out. Our Creamery has been collecting milk and shipping butter in an old roadster with a wagon bed thorax for a year. Two of our rural route mail carriers use small machines, except in wet weather, and good-roads societies in our vicinity are the latest fad. We raised one thousand five hundred dollars last spring to bring the Cannon Ball Trail from Chicago to Kansas City through our town, and our hotel-keeper contributed one hundred dollars of it. He says we'll be on the gas-line tourist route to the coast after the trail has been marked and drained and graded up well. But mostly the automobile means freedom to us. We're no longer citizens of Homeburg but of the congressional district. We're neighbors to towns we hadn't heard of ten years ago, and the horizon nowadays for most of us is located at the end of a ten-gallon tank of gasoline. Why, in the old days, you had to go fifty miles east and double back to get into the north part of our county, and more of us had crossed the ocean than had been to Pallsbury in the north tier of townships. Now our commercial clubs meet together alternate months, and about seventeen babies in our town have proud grandparents up there. That's part of what the automobile means to us, Jim. Can you blame me for being so interested in a new one? Maybe it will have some contrivance for scaring cows out of a narrow road. X THE HOMEBURG TELEPHONE EXCHANGE _What Would Happen if We Tried to Get Along With a City Operator_ All right, Jim! Having now completed the task of telephoning to Murray Hill several thousand and something, I'm ready to join you at luncheon. I'm glad I telephoned. I won't have to spend the afternoon doing it now and, besides, I feel so triumphant. I got through this time without forgetting to get a nickel first. I usually go into one of those wooden overcoats and go through all the agonies of elbowing my way through half a dozen centrals into some one's ear several miles away, and then discover that I haven't anything but a half dollar. Then I have to stop and begin all over again.