the Jews occasionally—­they may just get in by mistake, but you ought to have a rule at the office against printing stories as old as the hills about Jews burning down their clothing-stores to get the insurance.  I’ve known a few Gentiles that did that.  The only man I know that I’d lend money to without security is a Jew.  Let’s not jump on people just to hurt their feelings.  And besides, we don’t any of us know much more these days than old Moses knew.  And that fellow who writes the little two-line pieces under the regular editorials—­he’s too smart, and he ain’t always as funny as he thinks he is.  There’s no use in popping bird-shot at things if they ain’t right, and that fellow’s always trying to hurt somebody’s feelings without doing anybody any good.”

She opened a drawer of her desk and drew out a memorandum to refresh her memory.

“You’ve got a whole page and on Sundays two pages about baseball and automobiles, and the horse is getting crowded down into a corner.  We”—­he was not unmindful of the plural—­“we must print more horse news.  You tell Atwill to send his young man that does the ‘Horse and Track’ around to see me occasionally and I’ll be glad to help him get some horse news that is news.  I wouldn’t want to have you bounce a young man who’s doing the best he can, but it doesn’t do a newspaper any good to speak of Dan Patch as a trotting-horse or give the record of my two-year-old filly Penelope O as 2:09-1/4 when she made a clean 2:09.  You’ve got to print facts in a newspaper if you want people to respect it.  How about that, Morton?”

“You’re right, Aunt Sally.  I’ll speak to Atwill about his horse news.”

He began to wonder whether she were not amusing herself at his expense; but she gave him no reason for doubting her seriousness.  They might have been partners from the beginning of time from her businesslike manner of criticizing the paper.  She had not only flatly refused to sell her shares, but she was taking advantage of the opportunity (for which she seemed to be prepared) to tell him how the “Courier” should be conducted!

“About farming, Morton,” she continued deliberately, “the ‘Courier’ has fun every now and then over the poor but honest farmer, and prints pictures of him when he comes to town for the State Fair that make him look like a scarecrow.  Farming, Morton, is a profession, nowadays, and those poor yaps Eggleston wrote about in ‘The Hoosier Schoolmaster’ were all dead and buried before you were born.  Farmers are up and coming I can tell you, and I wouldn’t lose their business by poking fun at ’em.  That Saturday column of farm news, by the way, is a fraud—­all stolen out of the ‘Western Farmers’ Weekly’ and no credit.  They must keep that column in cold storage to run it the way they do.  They’re usually about a season behind time—­telling how to plant corn along in August and planting winter wheat about Christmas.  Our farm editor must have been raised on a New York roof-garden.  Another