Sketches New and Old

  MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE

  I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen--an unusually smartchild, I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaperscribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation inthe community. It did, indeed, and I was very proud of it, too. I was aprinter's "devil," and a progressive and aspiring one. My uncle had meon his paper (the Weekly Hannibal Journal, two dollars a year in advance--five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cordwood, cabbages, andunmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer's day he left town to begone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of thepaper judiciously. Ah! didn't I want to try! Higgins was the editor onthe rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend foundan open note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated that he couldnot longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek. The friendran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore. He hadconcluded he wouldn't. The village was full of it for several days,but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought this was a fine opportunity.I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole matter, and thenillustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of woodentype with a jackknife--one of them a picture of Higgins wading out intothe creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the waterwith a walking-stick. I thought it was desperately funny, and wasdensely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such apublication. Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for otherworlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interestingmatter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a pieceof gratuitous rascality and "see him squirm."

  I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the "Burial ofSir John Moore"--and a pretty crude parody it was, too.

  Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously--not because theyhad done anything to deserve, but merely because I thought it was my dutyto make the paper lively.

  Next I gently touched up the newest stranger--the lion of the day, thegorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb ofthe first water, and the "loudest" dressed man in the state. He was aninveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy "poetry" for thejournal, about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my week were headed,"To MARY IN H--l," meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course. But whilesetting up the piece I was suddenly riven from head to heel by what Iregarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humor, and I compressed it into asnappy footnote at the bottom--thus: "We will let this thing pass, justthis once; but we wish Mr. J. Gordon Runnels to understand distinctlythat we have a character to sustain, and from this time forth when hewants to commune with his friends in h--l, he must select some othermedium than the columns of this journal!"

  The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so muchattention as those playful trifles of mine.

  For once the Hannibal Journal was in demand--a novelty it had notexperienced before. The whole town was stirred. Higgins dropped in witha double-barreled shotgun early in the forenoon. When he found that itwas an infant (as he called me) that had done him the damage, he simplypulled my ears and went away; but he threw up his situation that nightand left town for good. The tailor came with his goose and a pair ofshears; but he despised me, too, and departed for the South that night.The two lampooned citizens came with threats of libel, and went awayincensed at my insignificance. The country editor pranced in with awar-whoop next day, suffering for blood to drink; but he ended byforgiving me cordially and inviting me down to the drug store to washaway all animosity in a friendly bumper of "Fahnestock's Vermifuge."It was his little joke. My uncle was very angry when he got back--unreasonably so, I thought, considering what an impetus I had given thepaper, and considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought tohave been uppermost in his mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had sowonderfully escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his headshot off.

  But he softened when he looked at the accounts and saw that I hadactually booked the unparalleled number of thirty-three new subscribers,and had the vegetables to show for it, cordwood, cabbage, beans, andunsalable turnips enough to run the family for two years!