ip. Sam's two years at Ament's were now complete, and
Orion induced him to take employment on the Journal. Henry at eleven was
taken out of school to learn typesetting.

Orion was a gentle, accommodating soul, but he lacked force and
independence.

"I followed all the advice I received," he says in his record. "If two
or more persons conflicted with each other, I adopted the views of the
last."

He started full of enthusiasm. He worked like a slave to save help:
wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night. The
others worked too. Orion gave them hard tasks and long hours. He had
the feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all; that all
must labor without stint. In his usual self-accusing way he wrote
afterward:

I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam. He was as swift and as clean as a
good journeyman. I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I
begrudged him the time and made him work more. He set a clean proof, and
Henry a very dirty one. The correcting was left to be done in the form
the day before publication. Once we were kept late, and Sam complained
with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on Henry's dirty
proofs.

Orion did not realize any injustice at the time. The game was too
desperate to be played tenderly. His first editorials were so brilliant
that it was not believed he could have written them. The paper
throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success. But
the pace was too hard to maintain. Overwork brought weariness, and
Orion's enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble. He became
still more exacting.

It is not to be supposed that Sam Clemens had given up all amusements to
become merely a toiling drudge or had conquered in any large degree his
natural taste for amusement. He had become more studious; but after the
long, hard days in the office it was not to be expected that a boy of
fifteen would employ the evening--at least not every evening--in reading
beneficial books. The river was always near at hand--for swimming in the
summer and skating in the winter--and once even at this late period it
came near claiming a heavy tribute. That was one winter's night when
with another boy he had skated until nearly midnight. They were about in
the middle of the river when they heard a terrific and grinding noise
near the shore. They knew what it was. The ice was breaking up, and
they set out for home forthwith. It was moonli