at all, it was only sometimes
--and then the town subscribers paid in groceries, the country
subscribers in cabbages and cordwood. If they paid, they were puffed in
the paper; and if the editor forgot to insert the puff, the subscriber
stopped the paper! Every subscriber regarded himself as assistant
editor, ex officio; gave orders as to how the paper was to be edited,
supplied it with opinions, and directed its policy. Of course, every
time the editor failed to follow his suggestions, he revenged himself by
stopping the paper!

After some financial stress, the paper was moved into the Clemens home,
a "two-story brick"; and here for several years it managed to worry
along, spasmodically hovering between life and death. Life was easy
with the editors of that paper; for if they pied a form, they suspended
until the next week. They always suspended anyhow, every now and then,
when the fishing was good; and always fell back upon the illness of the
editor as a convenient excuse, Mark admitted that this was a paltry
excuse, for the all-sufficing reason that a paper of that sort was just
as well off with a sick editor as a well one, and better off with a dead
one than with either of them. At the age of fifteen he considered
himself a skilled journeyman printer; and his faculty for comedic
portrayal had already betrayed itself in occasional clumsy efforts. In
'My First Literary Venture', he narrates his experiences, amongst others
how greatly he increased the circulation of the paper, and incensed the
"inveterate woman-killer," whose poetry for that week's paper read, "To
Mary in H--l" (Hannibal). Mark added a "snappy foot--note" at the
bottom, in which he agreed to let the thing pass, for just that once;
but distinctly warning Mr. J. Gordon Runnels that the paper had a
character to sustain, and that in future, when Mr. Runnels wanted to
commune with his friends in h--l, he must select some other medium for
that communication! Many were the humorous skits, crudely illustrated
with cuts made from wooden blocks hacked out with his jack-knife, which
the mischievous young "devil" inserted in his brother's paper. Here we
may discern the first spontaneous outcroppings of the genuine humorist.
"It was on this paper, the 'Hannibal Journal'," says his biographer, Mr.
Albert B. Paine, "that young Sam Clemens began his writings--burlesques,
as a rule, of local characters and conditions--usually published in his
brother's absence