,
advances upon which one started with stronger determination and fuller,
not lessened, confidence. O heart of Youth! How unfluttered thy beat!
How invincible thou art in thine own conceit! What gift of heaven or
earth can compare with thy supernal faith! "No matter how small the
cage the bird will sing if it has a voice."

Had my letters been thrown into the wastepaper basket, after an
impatient glance by the recipients, I should not have been surprised or
more than a little nettled; but I received answers not encouraging from
both Horace Greeley and Mr. Dana.

Mr. Greeley was brief and final, but Mr. Dana, writing in his own hand
(how friendly it was of him!), qualified an impulse to encourage with a
tag for self-protection. "Your letter does you credit," he wrote.
Those five words put me on the threshold of my goal. "Your letter does
you credit, and I shall be glad to hear from you again----" A door
opened, and a flood of light and warmth from behind it enveloped me as
in a gown of eiderdown. "I shall be glad to hear from you again three
or four years from now!" The door slammed in my face, the gown slipped
off, and left me with a chill. But I did not accuse Mr. Dana of
deliberately hurting me or think that he surmised how a polite evasion
of that sort may without forethought be more cruel than the coldest and
most abrupt negative.

I went farther afield, despatching my letters to Chicago, Philadelphia,
Boston, and Springfield. In Philadelphia there was a little paper
called the _Day_, and this is what its editor wrote to me:

"There are several vacancies in the editorial department, but there is
one vacancy still worse on the ground floor, and the cashier is its
much-harried victim. You might come here, but you would starve to
death, and saddle your friends with the expenses of a funeral."

A man with humour enough for that ought to have prospered, and I
rejoiced to learn soon afterward that he (I think his name was Cobb)
had been saved from his straits by an appointment to the United States
Mint!

His jocularity did not shake my faith in the seriousness of journalism.
I had not done laughing when I opened another letter written in a fine,
crabbed hand like the scratching of a diamond on a window-pane, and as
I slowly deciphered its contents I could hardly believe what I read.
It was from Samuel Bowles the elder, editor of the Springfield
_Republican_, then as now one of the sanest, most respected