Of course it wasn't Jimmy's fault. The "rising young undertaker" had paid the tramp printer, who made up the forms, five dollars to work his paid local into the funeral notice. But after that--Jimmy had to go. Public sentiment would no longer stand him as a reporter on the paper, and we gave him a good letter and sent him onward and upward. He took his dismissal decently enough. He realised that his luck was against him; he knew that we had borne with him in all patience. The day that he left he was instructing the new man in the ways of the town. Reverend Frank Milligan came in with a church notice. Jimmy took the notice and began marking it for the printer. As the door behind him opened and closed, Jimmy, with his head still in his work, called across the room to the new man: "That was old Milligan that just went out--beware of him. He will load you up with truck about himself. He rings in his sermons; trots around with church social notices that ought to be paid for, and tries to get them in free; likes to be referred to as doctor; slips in mean items about his congregation, if you don't watch him; and insists on talking religion Saturday morning when you are too busy to spit. More than that, he has an awful breath--cut him out; he will make life a burden if you don't--and if you do he will go to the old man with it, and say you are not treating him right." [Illustration: Reverend Milligan came in with a church notice] There was a rattling and a scratching on the wire partition between Jimmy and the door. Jimmy looked up from his work and saw the sprightly little figure of Parson Milligan coming over the railing like a monkey. He had not gone out of the door--a printer had come in when it opened and shut. And then Jimmy took his last flying trip out of the back door of the office, down the alley, "toward the sunset's purple rim." It was not his fault. He was only telling the truth--where it would do the most good. XII "'A Babbled of Green Fields"