would insist on his stopping to produce an article or so while he
waited. However, the time had come when the inevitable had to be faced.
His golden privacy must be ravished for the grim god of bread and meat.
The next afternoon he put on his hat with a bad grace, and went forth to
seek Colonel Cowles, editor-in-chief of the leading paper in the State.

The morning _Post_ was an old paper, which had been in the hands of a
single family from A.D. 1846 till only the other day. It had been a
power during the war, a favorite mouthpiece of President Davis. It had
stood like a wall during the cruelties of Reconstruction; had fought the
good fight for white man's rule; had crucified carpet-baggism and
scalawaggery upon a cross of burning adjective. Later it had labored
gallantly for Tilden; denounced Hayes as a robber; idolized Cleveland;
preached free trade with pure passion; swallowed free silver; stood
"regular," though not without grimaces, through Bryanism. The _Post_
was, in short, a paper with an honorable history, and everybody felt a
kind of affection for it. The plain fact remained, however, that within
recent years a great many worthy persons had acquired the habit of
reading the more hustling _State_.

The _Post_, not to put too fine a point upon it, had for a time run fast
to seed. The third generation of its owners had lost their money, mostly
in land speculations in the suburbs of New York City, and in the State
of Oregon. You could have thrown a brick from their office windows and
hit far better land speculations, but they had the common fault of
believing that things far away from home are necessarily and always the
best. The demand rose for bigger, fatter newspapers, with comic sections
and plenty of purple ink, and the _Post's_ owners found themselves
unable to supply it. In fact they had to retort by mortgaging their
property to the hilt and cutting expenses to rock-bottom. These were