Editorial Wild Oats

My First Literary Venture

I was a very smart child at the 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 Hannibal
Journal_, two dollars a year, in advance--five hundred subscribers,
and they paid in cord-wood, 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 villanous 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 about such a publication. Being
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 country paper with a piece of
gratuitous rascality and "see him squirm."

[Illustration: "HE HAD CONCLUDED HE WOULDN'T"]

I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the
"Burial of Sir John Moore"--and a pretty crude parody it was, too.

Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously--not because
they had done anything to deserve it, but merely because I thought
it was my duty to make the paper lively.

Next I gently touched up the newest stranger--the lion of the day,
the gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering
coxcomb of the first water, and the "loudest" dressed man in the
State. He was an inveterate w