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 woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy
"poetry" for the _Journal_, about his newest conquest. His rhymes
for my week were headed, "TO MARY IN H--L," meaning to Mary in
Hannibal, of course. But while setting up the piece I was suddenly
riven from head to heel by what I regarded as a perfect thunderbolt
of humor, and I compressed it into a snappy footnote at the
bottom--thus:
"We will let this thing pass, just this once; but we wish Mr. J.
Gordon Runnels to understand distinctly that we have a character
to sustain, and from this time forth when he wants to commune
with his friends in h--l, he must select some other medium than
the columns of this journal!"
The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so
much attention as those playful trifles of mine.
For once the _Hannibal Journal_ was in demand--a novelty it had
not experienced before. The whole town was stirred. Higgins dropped
in with a double-barrelled shot-gun early in the forenoon. When he
found that it was an infant (as he called me) that had done him the
damage, he simply pulled my ears and went away; but he threw up his
situation that night and left town for good. The tailor came with
his goose and a pair of shears; but he despised me, too, and
departed for the South that night. The two lampooned citizens came
with threats of libel, and went away incensed at my insignificance.
The country editor pranced in with a warwhoop next day, suffering
for blood to drink; but he ended by forgiving me cordially and
inviting me down to the drug-store to wash away all animosity in a
friendly bumper of "Fahnestock's Vermifuge." It was his little
joke. My uncle was very angry when he got back--unreasonably so, I
thought, considering what an impetus I had given the paper, and
considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought to have
been uppermost in his mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had so
wonderfully escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his
head shot off. But he softened when he looked at the accounts and
saw that I had actually booked the unparalleled number of
thirty-three new subscribers, and had the vegetables to show for
it--cord-wood, cabbage, beans, and unsalable turnips enough to run
the family for two years!