“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “But I’m going to find out.” One hour later she walked into the editorial sanctum of Mr. “Bart” Snyder, editor, proprietor, and controlling mind of as “yellow” a sheet as ever subsisted on a combination of enterprise, real journalistic ability, and blackmail. Mr. Snyder sat in a perfect slump of apparent languor, his body sagging back into his tilted chair, one foot across his desk, the other trailing like a broken wing along the floor, his shrewd, lined face uplifted at an acute angle with the cigar he was chewing, and his green hat achieving the most rakish effect possible to a third slant. His brilliant gray eyes were narrowed into a hard twinkle as he surveyed his visitor. “Siddown,” he grunted, and shoved a chair toward her with the grounded foot. Grandma Sharpless did not “siddown.” Instead she marched over to a spot directly in front of him, halted, and looked straight into the hard, humorous face. “Bartholomew Snyder,” said she crisply, “I knew you when you were a boy. I knew your mother, too. She was a decent woman. Take off that hat.” The Snyder jaw fell so unpremeditatedly that the Snyder cigar dropped upon the littered floor. One third of a second later, the Snyder foot descended upon it (and it was a twenty-cent cigar, too) as the Snyder chair reverted to the perpendicular, and the Snyder hat came off. The Snyder countenance quivered into articulation and therefrom came a stunned, “Well, I’ll be—” “No, you don’t! Not in _my_ presence,” cut in his visitor. “Now, you listen.” “I’m listening,” he assured her in a strangled murmur. She seated herself and threw a quality of rigidity into her backbone calculated to impress if not actually to appeal. “I want your help,” she said. “Fine, fat way you’ve got of opening up a request for a favor,” he retorted, recovering himself somewhat, and in a particularly discouraging voice. But the shrewd old judge of human nature before him marked the little pursing at the corners of the mouth. “I’ll bet I know what it is.” “I’ll bet all the money I’ve got in the bank and my best gold tooth thrown in you don’t,” was the prompt retort. “There’s a sporting proposition, all right,” cried the editor in great admiration. “I thought you was going to ask me to let up on the city administration now you’ve got one of the fat jobs in the family, with your Dr. Strong.” “It’s a good thing you don’t have to make guesses for a living,” returned his caller scornfully. “Pitch into the administration as hard as you like. I don’t care. All I want is for you to print the news about this diphtheria epidemic.” “Is that all?” There was a profound sardonicism in the final word. “Come to think of it, it isn’t. I want you to print some editorials, too, telling people how to take care of themselves while the disease is spreading.” “Anything more?” “Well, you might do the same thing about the measles epidemic.”