MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE. 



I WAS a very smart child at tfie age of thirteen — an unusually smart child, I 

 thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper scribbling, and 

 most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation in the community. It 

 did, indeed, and I was very proud of it, too. I was a printer's " devil," and a 

 progressive and aspiring one. My uncle had me on his paper (the Weekly Hanni- 

 bal Jourfial, two dollars a year in advance — five hundred subscribers, and they 

 paid in cordwood, cabbages, and unmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer's 

 day he left town to be gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one 

 issue of the paper judiciously. Ah ! didn't I want to try ! Higgins was the editor 

 on the rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend found an open 

 note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated that he could no longer endure 

 life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek. The friend ran down there and 

 discovered Higgins wading back to shore! He had concluded 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 then illustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of 

 wooden type with a jack-knife — one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into 

 the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding ,the depth of the water with a 

 walking-stick. I thought it was desperately funny, and was densely unconscious 

 that there was any moral obliquity aboutjsuch a, putlicatipn. J3eing satisfied with 

 this effort I looked around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it 

 would make good, interesting matter to charge the editor of a neighboring counjtry 



