to myself, was during the first few months after I founded
the "Sentinel." There was pardonable boyish pride in seeing my name
given with studied prominence as editor and proprietor, and the reading
of my own editorials was as soothing as the soft, sweet strains of music
on distant waters in summer evening time. They were to my mind most
exquisite in diction and logic, and it was a source of keen regret that
they were so "cabined, cribbed, and confined" within the narrowest
provincial lines, whereby the world lost so much that it greatly
needed. I knew that there were others, like Chandler, Gales, Greeley,
Ritchie, Prentice, and Kendall, who were more read and heeded, but I was
consoled by the charitable reflection that entirely by reason of
fortuitous circumstance they were known and I was not. Then to me life
was a song with my generously self-admired newspaper as the chorus.
There came rude awakenings, of course, from those blissful dreams as the
shock of editorial conflict gradually taught me that journalism was one
unending lesson in a school that has no vacations.

I have pleasant memories also of the intimate personal relations between
the village editor and his readers. Most of them were within a radius of
a few miles of the publication office, and all the influences of social
as well as political ties were employed to make them enduring patrons.
With many of them the question of sparing from their scant income three
cents a week for a county paper, was one that called for sober thought
from year to year, and it often required a personal visit and earnest
importunity to hold the hesitating subscriber. I well remember the case
of a frugal farmer of the Dunker persuasion who was sufficiently
public-spirited to subscribe for the "Sentinel" for six months, to get
the paper started, but at the end of that period he had calculated the
heavy expenses of gathering the ripening harvest and decided to stop his
paper for a while. I need not say that he was enthusiastically
confronted with many reasons why a man of his intelligence and influence
should not be without the county newspaper, but he yielded only to the
extent of further considering the matter with his wife. He returned in a
few days and spread sunshine around the editorial chair by saying that
his wife had decided to continue for another six months, as the paper
would be very handy in the fall for tying up her apple-butter crocks.

A few years after I had settl