The editor now had the floor. The editor is of course the oracle of the community, and his newspaper, in the opinion of the entire population of Hurville--including himself--is an organ which for real power and earnest writing exceeds any of the monster dailies of the large cities, whose fame, stupidly enough, extends the length and breadth of the land, while the _Hurville Gazette_ blushes unseen, claiming only an average circulation of two thousand; and some say this is an exaggerated figure. The editor's story was of course thoroughly characteristic--editorial, so to speak--the recital going straight to the point at issue without redundant phraseology or extraneous matter of any kind: it was, in fact, a report, as epigrammatic as a six-lined local paragraph, boiled down to the utmost limit of concentrated fact-essence. Yet the gist of the story greatly surprised us. He had become interested in an anonymous female contributor of love-poems sent every week to a newspaper he was then editing in the West. At length, by dint of perseverance, he had unveiled the incognita of the poetess, in time won her affections, and finally married her. The general impression was that this must refer to a former wife, of whom we had never heard, for every one knew the editor's better half to be a diligent housekeeper, patient mother, a ceaseless sewing-machinist, a walking encyclopædia of cookery-recipes, and the least literary woman of our set. Poetry she never read, and she had even been known to sneer at rhymesters, especially those of her own sex, who, she averred, might find some better and more profitable way of passing their time than scribbling nonsense. Yet this change of views, the editor now assured us, was due solely to the influence of time and a very large and uncommonly obstreperous family of boys.