The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-06-04

readers who begin the narrative of an old friends adventures
 The society columns of our city papers set down the gongs and cOmings, the marriages and the deaths of people who are known only by name there are gowns realized only in dreams; there are social functions that seem staged upon distant stars. Yet you city people read of these things with avidity. But our social activities, chronicled in our country papers, tell of real people, whose hired girls are sisters to our hired girls, and so we know the secrets of their hearts We know a gown when it ap-
 pears three seasons in our society col
 umns, disguised by it's trimming and its covering, and it becomes familiar friend To read of it recalls other and happier days And when we read of a funeral
 in our country newspapers, we do not visualize it as mere church fight to see
 the grand persons in their solemn array
 on dress parade. A funeral notice to us country readers means something hu-
 man and sad. Between the formal lines
 that tell of the mournful affair we read many tragedy; we know the heartache;' we realize the Restitution that must come when the flowers are taken to the hos
 pital; we know what insurance the dead man carried, and how it must be stretched to meet the needs. We can see the quiet lines on each side of the walk leading from the house of sorrow after the serv- ices-the men on one side, %the women on
 the other-waiting to see the mourning families, and to be seen by them; we
 may smile through our tears at the un- congenial pallbearers and wonder what common ground of mirth they will find
 to till on the way back from the ceme- tery. In lists of wedding guests in our
 papers we know just what poor kin was
 remembered, and what was snubbed. We
 kno wwhen we read of a bankruptcy just
 which member of the firm or family
 brought it on, by extravaganza or sloth.
 We read that the wife of the hardware
 merchant is in Kansas City, and we know
 the feelings of the dry goods merchant
 who reads it and sees his own silks
 ignored. So when we see new kind of
 lawn mower on the dry goods merchants lawn. we don't blame him much for send. ing to the city for it.
 Our papers, our little country papers, seem drab and miserably provincial to strangers; yet we who read them read in their lines the sweet, intimate story of life. And all these touches of nature make us wondrous kind. It is the coun- try newspaper, bringing together daily the threads of the towns life, weaving them. into something rich and strange, and Setting the pattern as 1t weaves, directing the loom and giving the cloth its color by mixing the lives of all the people in it's color-pot-it is this country newspaper that reveals us to ourselves, that keeps our country hearts quick and our country minds open and our country faith strong.
 When the girl at the glove counter
 marries the boy in the wholesale house, the news of their wedding is good for
 40-line wedding notice, and the 40 lines in the country paper give them self | respect When in due course we know that their baby is 12-pounder, named Grover or Theodore or Woodrow, we the real democracy. When we read of death in that home we can mourn with 1 them ant mourn When we see them | moving upward in the world, into a firm, and out toward the country club Ineighborhood, we rejoice with them that rejoice. Therefore, men and brethren
 when you are riding through this vale Of tears upon the California Limited, | and by chance pick up the little coun- try newspaper with it's meagre telegraph I service of 5000 or 1000 words-or at best. 15.000 or 10000; when you see it's array of countryside items; it's intermnable local stories; it's tiresome editorials on 1 the waterworks. the schools, the street
 railroad, the crops and the city printing, | don't throw down the contemptible little rag with the verdict that there is nothing
 in it. But know this, and know it we'll:
 If you could take the clay from your eyes and read the little paper as it is
 written, you would find all of God S beautiful sorrowing, struggling aspiring world in it, and what you saw would
 make you touch the little paper with
 reverent hands.