And while all the world about him was growing rich,--or thought it was, which is the same thing,--Brownwell seemed to be struggling to keep barely even with the score of life.

The _Banner_ of course ran as a daily, but it was a miserable, half-starved little sheet, badly printed, and edited, as the printers used to say, with a pitchfork.

It looked shiftless and dirty-faced long before Brownwell began to look seedy.

Editor Brownwell was forever going on excursions--editorial excursions, land-buyers' excursions, corn trains, fruit trains, trade trains, political junkets, tours of inspection of new towns and new fields, and for consideration he was forever writing grandiloquent accounts of his adventures home to the _Banner_.

But from the very first he ostentatiously left Molly, his wife, at home.