“If you should do yourself the injustice at some time in the future to look it over,” Mr. Biggs continued, indicating that I was not to look at it then, but to listen, “you would find it filled with all sorts of ingenious appeals for the farmer’s money, and that the editor claims to be poor, but honest, and oppressed by monopolies, like the rest of them. But what are the hard, uncomfortable facts?” I looked at him as if to say that I did not know what the facts were, but had no doubt they were bad enough. “The facts are that while the agricultural population is cooped up in hot school-houses drinking spring water, and attending Alliance meetings, the publisher of the ‘Rural’ is holding ice in his mouth at an elegant club, only changing this delightful occupation to gulp down expensive champagne. He lives in a villa, does this agricultural fraud of the name of Litch, and makes a fortune every year; and, although he earnestly advises the farmers’ wives and daughters to spend their spare time in churning the butter and gathering the eggs, to buy good books to improve themselves (P. S.--For which he is agent), he sends his own wife and daughters to spend their spare time in summer at cool places, where they may swim in the sea. That’s the kind of an oppressed citizen of a groaning government Litch is, and I happen to know that he is the friend of the monopolists he denounces, and that he is in their pay; that he is the tool of the thieves who manufacture worthless machinery for farmers; of the confidence men who advertise eggs, pigs and calves at a high price, and that he is the worst enemy of the farmers generally.” I pretended to be very much surprised at this, though I was not. “If you should be caught in a lonely place on a rainy day, with no other paper in your pocket than that, you would find a column of inquiries with reference to agricultural matters addressed to the editor (who is supposed to be informed, but who really gets all his information from the agricultural departments of the metropolitan papers), each one of which closes with a good word for ‘your noble,’ or ‘your brave,’ or ‘your widely circulated’ paper. The scoundrel writes them himself! And there is another column from ‘Aunt Sue.’ He is also ‘Aunt Sue.’ In short, he is everything except an honest man.” Although I said nothing, I remembered that every farmer who moved to Twin Mounds found out the agricultural papers, and denounced them; in short, that everybody except the farmers knew what dreadful frauds they were.