my nephew, William B. Mitchell, who was thirteen, knew nothing
of types, but was a model of patient industry.

Our magnanimous printers hung around hotels, laughing at the absurdity
of this amateur office. We might set type, but when it came to making
and locking up a form, ha, ha, wouldn't there be sport? That handsome
new type would all be a mess of pi, then somebody would be obliged to
come to their terms or St. Cloud would be without a paper. It was their
great opportunity to display their interest in the general welfare, and
they embraced it to the full; but of the little I had learned in that
short apprenticeship six years ago, I retained a clear conception of the
principles of justification by works. I brought these to bear on those
forms, made them up, locked them, and sent for Stephen Miller to carry
them to the press, when each one lifted like a paving stone; but alas,
alas, the columns read from right to left. I unlocked them, put the
matter back in the galleys, made them up new, and we had the paper off
on time.

From that time until the first of January, '63, I carried on the
business of practical printer, issued a paper every week, did a large
amount of job work, was city and county printer for half a dozen
counties, did all the legal advertising, published the tax lists, and
issued extras during the Indian massacres.

CHAPTER XLV.

THE REBELLION.

When, after Mr. Lincoln's election, the South made the North understand
that her threats of disunion meant something more than "tin kettle
thunder," there was little spirit of compromise among the Republicans
and Douglas Democrats of Minnesota, who generally looked with impatience
on the abject servility with which Northern men in Congress begged their
Southern masters not to leave them, with no slaves to catch, no peculiar
institution to guard.

I was in favor of not only permitting the Southern States to leave the
Union, but of driving them out of it as we would drive tramps out of a
drawing room. _Put_ them out! and open every avenue for the escape of
their slaves. But from that spirit of conciliation with which the North
first met, secession, the change was sudden. The fire on Sumter lit an
actual flame of freedom, and the people were ready then to wipe slavery
from the whole face of the land. When Gen. Fremont issued his famous
order confiscating the slaves of rebels in arms, I was in receipt of a
large exchange list, and have never seen such u