Though our loathed but esteemed contemporary, the _Statesman_, speaks of our town as "this city," and calls the marshal "chief of police," we are none the less a country town. Like hundreds of its kind, our little daily newspaper is equipped with typesetting machines and is printed from a web perfecting press, yet it is only a country newspaper, and knowing this we refuse to put on city airs. Of course we print the afternoon Associated Press report on the first page, under formal heads and with some pretence of dignity, but that first page is the parlour of the paper, as it is of most of its contemporaries, and in the other pages they and we go around in our shirt sleeves, calling people by their first names; teasing the boys and girls good-naturedly; tickling the pompous members of the village family with straws from time to time, and letting out the family secrets of the community without much regard for the feelings of the supercilious. Nine or ten thousand people in our town go to bed on this kind of mental pabulum, as do country-town dwellers all over the United States, and although we do not claim that it is helpful, we do contend that it does not hurt them. Certainly by poking mild fun at the shams--the town pharisees--we make it more difficult to maintain the class lines which the pretenders would establish. Possibly by printing the news of everything that happens, suppressing nothing "on account of the respectability of the parties concerned," we may prevent some evil-doers from going on with their plans, but this is mere conjecture, and we do not set it down to our credit. What we maintain is that in printing our little country dailies, we, the scribes, from one end of the world to the other, get more than our share of fun out of life as we go along, and pass as much of it on to our neighbours as we can spare. [Illustration: Suppressing nothing "on account of the respectability of the parties concerned"]