l Steve's extravagant love-making
in resentful earnest.

We got but little variety in the way of food at that kitchen table, and
there wasn't enough of it anyway. So we apprentices used to keep alive
by arts of our own--that is to say, we crept into the cellar nearly
every night, by a private entrance which we had discovered, and we
robbed the cellar of potatoes and onions and such things, and carried
them down-town to the printing-office, where we slept on pallets on the
floor, and cooked them at the stove and had very good times.

As I have indicated, Mr. S.'s economies were of a pretty close and rigid
kind. By and by, when we apprentices were promoted from the basement to
the ground floor and allowed to sit at the family table, along with the
one journeyman, Harry H., the economies continued. Mrs. S. was a bride.
She had attained to that distinction very recently, after waiting a good
part of a lifetime for it, and she was the right woman in the right
place, according to the economics of the place, for she did not trust
the sugar-bowl to us, but sweetened our coffee herself. That is, she
went through the motions. She didn't really sweeten it. She seemed to
put one heaping teaspoonful of brown sugar into each cup, but, according
to Steve, that was a deceit. He said she dipped the spoon in the coffee
first to make the sugar stick, and then scooped the sugar out of the
bowl with the spoon upside down, so that the effect to the eye was a
heaped-up spoon, whereas the sugar on it was nothing but a layer. This
all seems perfectly true to me, and yet that thing would be so difficult
to perform that I suppose it really didn't happen, but was one of
Steve's lies.

MARK TWAIN.

(_To be Continued._)

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

No. DCVIII.

FEBRUARY 1, 1907.

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XI.

BY MARK TWAIN.

[Sidenote: (1850.)]

[_Dictated March 28th, 1906._] About 1849 or 1850 Orion severed his
connection with the printing-house in St. Louis and came up to Hannibal,
and bought a weekly paper called the Hannibal "Journal," together with
its plant and its good-will, for the sum of five hundred dollars cash.
He borrowed the cash at ten per cent. interest, from an old farmer named
Johnson who lived five miles out of town. Then he reduced the
subscription price of the paper from two dollars to one dollar. He
reduced the rates for adve