In the afternoon, between two and three o'clock, the messenger boy from the telegraph office brings over the final sheet of the day's report of the Associated Press. Always at the end is the signature "Thirty." That tells us that the report is closed for the day. Just why "Thirty" should be used to indicate the close of the day's work no one seems to know. It is the custom. They do so in telegraph offices all over the country, and in the newspaper business "Thirty" stands so significantly for the end that whenever a printer or a reporter dies his associates generally feel called upon to have a floral emblem made with that figure in the centre. It is therefore entirely proper that these sketches of life in a country town, seen through a reporter's eyes, should close with that symbolic word. But how to close? That is the question. Sitting here by the office window, with the smell of ink in one's nostrils, with the steady monotonous clatter of the linotypes in the ears, and the whirring of the shafting from the press-room in the basement throbbing through one's nerves, with the very material realisation of the office around one; we feel that only a small part of it, and of the life about it, has been set down in these sketches. Passing the office window every moment is someone with a story that should be told. Every human life, if one could know it well and translate it into language, has in it the making of a great story. It is because we are blind that we pass men and women around us, heedless of the tragic quality of their lives. If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, of joys, of base temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own, which he thinks so peculiarly isolated from the web of life, how much kinder, how much gentler he would be! And how much richer life would be for all of us! Life is dull to no one; but life seems dull to those dull persons who think life is dull for others, and who see only the drab and grey shades in the woof that is woven about them. Here in our town are ten thousand people, and yet these sketches have told of less than two score of them. In the town are thousands of others quite as interesting as these of whom we have written. A few minutes ago Jim Bolton rode by on his hack. There is no reason why others should be advertised of men and Jim left out; for Jim is the proudest man in town.