IV

My elder brother and I had several ideals in common quite apart from my

own literary ideals. One of these was life in a village, as differenced

from life in the country, or in any city, large or little; another was

the lasting renunciation of the printing-business in every form. The

last was an effect from the anxiety which we had shared with our father

and mother in the long adversity, ending in the failure of his

newspaper, from which we had escaped to the country. Once clear of that

disaster, we meant never to see a press or a case of types again; and

after our year of release from them in the country my brother had his

hopes of learning the river and becoming a steamboat pilot, but failed

in these, and so joined us in Columbus, where he had put off the evil

day of his return to the printing-business a little longer. Meanwhile I

had yielded to my fate and spent the whole winter in a printing-office;

and now we were both going to take up our trade, so abhorrent in its

memories, but going gladly because of the chances which it held out to

my father at a time when there seemed no other chance in the world for

him.

Yet we were about to fulfil our other ideal by going to live in a

village. The paper which we were to help make my father make his by our

work--for he had no money to buy it--was published in Ashtabula, now a

rather obstreperous little city, full of industrial noise and grime,

with a harbor emulous of the gigantic activities of the Cleveland

lake-front, but it must even then have had a thousand people. Our ideal,

therefore, was not perfectly realized till our office was transferred

some ten miles inland to the county-seat, for whatever business and

political reasons of the joint stock company which had now taken over

the paper, with my father as editor. With its four hundred inhabitants

less Jefferson was so much more than Ashtabula a village; and its young

gaieties welcomed us and our little force of printers to a social

liberty and equality which I long hoped some day to paint as a phase of

American civilization worthy the most literal fidelity of fiction. But I

shall now never do that, and I must be content to borrow from an

earlier page some passages which uninventively record the real events

and conditions of our enterprise.

In politics, the county was always overwhelmingly Freesoil, as the

forerunner of the Republican party was then called; the Whigs had hardly

gathered themselves together since the defeat of General Scott for the

Presidency; the Democrats, though dominant in state and nation, and

faithful to slavery at every election, did not greatly outnumber among

us the zealots called Comeouters, who would not vote at all under a

Constitution recognizing the right of men to own men. Our paper was

Freesoil, and its field was large among that vast majority of the people

who believed that slavery would finally perish if kept out of the

territories and confined to the old Slave States.

The people of the county were mostly farmers, and of these nearly all

were dairymen. The few manufactures were on a small scale, except

perhaps the making of oars, which were shipped all over the world from

the heart of the primeval forests densely wooding the vast levels of the

region. The portable steam-sawmills dropped down on the borders of the

woods have long since eaten their way through and through them, and

devoured every stick of timber in most places, and drunk up the

watercourses that the woods once kept full; but at that time half the

land was in the shadow of those mighty poplars and hickories, elms and

chestnuts, ashes and hemlocks; and the meadows that pastured the herds

of red cattle were dotted with stumps as thick as harvest stubble. Now

there are not even stumps; the woods are gone, and the watercourses are

torrents in spring and beds of dry clay in summer. The meadows

themselves have vanished, for it has been found that the strong yellow

soil will produce more in grain than in milk. There is more money in the

hands of the farmers there now, but half a century ago there was

[Illustration: _One of the last log houses to survive in the vicinity of

Jefferson. When Mr. Howells lived in the town such dwellings were common

in the surrounding farm region_]

so much less that fifty dollars seldom passed through a farmer's hands

in a year. Payment was made us in kind rather than in coin, and every

sort of farm produce was legal tender at the printing-office. Wood was

welcome in any quantity, for our huge box-stove consumed it with

inappeasable voracity, and even then did not heat the wide, low room

which was at once editorial-room, composing-room, and press-room.

Perhaps this was not so much the fault of the stove as of the building.

In that cold, lake-shore country the people dwelt in wooden structures

almost as thin and flimsy as tents; and often in the first winter of our

sojourn the type froze solid with the water which the compositor put on

it when he wished to distribute his case, placed near the window so as

to get all the light there was, but getting all the cold there was, too.

From time to time the compositor's fingers became so stiff that blowing

on them would not avail; he made many excursions between his stand and

the stove; in severe weather he practised the device of warming his

whole case of types by the fire, and, when they lost heat, warming it

again.

The first floor of our office-building was used by a sash-and-blind

factory; there was a machine-shop somewhere in it, and a mill for sawing

out shingles; and it was better fitted to the exercise of these robust

industries than to the requirements of our more delicate craft. Later,

we had a more comfortable place, in a new wooden "business block," and

for several years before I left it the office was domiciled in an old

dwelling-house, which we bought, and which we used without much change.

It could never have been a very comfortable dwelling, and my

associations with it are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than that

we were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate of that region is

rough and fierce; I know that there were lovely summers and lovelier

autumns in my time there, full of sunsets of a strange, wild,

melancholy splendor, I suppose from some atmospheric influence of the

lake; but I think chiefly of the winters, so awful to us after the mild

seasons of southern Ohio; the frosts of ten and twenty below; the

village streets and the country roads drowned in snow, the consumptives

in the thin houses, and the "slippin'," as the sleighing was called,

that lasted from December to April with hardly a break. At first our

family was housed on a farm a little way out, because there was no

tenement to be had in the village, and my father and I used to walk to

and from the office together in the morning and evening. I had taught

myself to read Spanish, in my passion for _Don Quixote_, and I was now,

at the age of fifteen, intending to write a life of Cervantes. The

scheme occupied me a good deal in those bleak walks, and perhaps it was

because my head was so hot with it that my feet were always very cold;

but my father assured me that they would get warm as soon as my boots

froze. If I have never yet written that life of Cervantes, on the other

hand I have never been quite able to make it clear to myself why my feet

should have got warm when my boots froze.

V

It may have been only a theory of his; it may have been a joke. He had a

great many theories and a great many jokes, and together they always

kept life interesting and sunshiny for him. With his serene temperament

and his happy doubt of disaster in any form, he was singularly fitted to

encounter the hardships of a country editor's lot. But for the moment,

and for what now seems a long time after the removal of our paper to the

county-seat, these seem to have vanished. The printing-office was the

center of civic and social interest; it was frequented by visitors at

all times, and on publication day it was a scene of gaiety that looks a

little incredible in the retrospect. The place was as bare and rude as a

printing-office seems always to be: the walls were splotched with ink

and the floor littered with refuse newspapers; but, lured by the novelty

of the affair, and perhaps attracted by a natural curiosity to see what

manner of strange men the printers were, the school-girls and young

ladies of the village flocked in and made it like a scene of comic

opera, with their pretty dresses and faces, their eager chatter and

lively energy in folding the papers and addressing them to the

subscribers, while our fellow-citizens of the place, like the bassos and

barytones and tenors of the chorus, stood about and looked on with

faintly sarcastic faces. It would not do to think now of what sorrow

life and death have since wrought for all those happy young creatures,

but I may recall without too much pathos the sensation when some citizen

volunteer relaxed from his gravity far enough to relieve the regular

mercenary at the crank of our huge power-press wheel, amid the applause

of the whole company.

We were very vain of that press, which replaced the hand-press hitherto

employed in printing the paper. This was of the style and make of the

hand-press which superseded the Ramage press of Franklin's time; but it

had been decided to signalize our new departure by the purchase of a

power-press of modern contrivance and of a speed fitted to meet the

demands of a subscription-list which might be indefinitely extended. A

deputation of the leading politicians accompanied the editor to New

York, where he went to choose the machine, and where he bought a

second-hand Adams press of the earliest pattern and patent. I do not

know, or at this date I would not undertake to say, just what principle

governed his selection of this superannuated veteran; it seems not to

have been very cheap; but possibly he had a prescience of the

disabilities which were to task his ingenuity to the very last days of

that press. Certainly no man of less gift and skill could have coped

with its infirmities, and I am sure that he thoroughly enjoyed nursing

it into such activity as carried it hysterically through those far-off

publication days. It had obscure functional disorders of various kinds,

so that it would from time to time cease to act, and would have to be

doctored by the hour before it would go on. There was probably some

organic trouble, too, for, though it did not really fall to pieces on

our hands, it showed itself incapable of profiting by several

improvements which he invented, and could, no doubt, have successfully

applied to the press if its constitution had not been undermined. It

went with a crank set in a prodigious fly-wheel which revolved at a

great rate, till it came to the moment of making the impression, when

the whole mechanism was seized with such a reluctance as nothing but an

heroic effort at the crank could overcome. It finally made so great a

draught upon our forces that it was decided to substitute steam for

muscle in its operation, and we got a small engine which could fully

sympathize with the press in having seen better days. I do not know that

there was anything the matter with the engine itself, but the boiler had

some peculiarities which might well mystify the casual spectator. He

could easily have satisfied himself that there was no danger of its

blowing up when he saw my brother feeding bran or corn-meal into its

safety-valve in order to fill up certain seams or fissures in it which

caused it to give out at the moments of the greatest reluctance in the

press. But still he must have had his misgivings of latent danger of

some other kind, though nothing ever actually happened of a hurtful

character. To this day I do not know just where those seams or fissures

were, but I think they were in the boiler-head, and that it was

therefore suffering from a kind of chronic fracture of the skull. What

is certain is that, somehow, the engine and the press did always get us

through publication day, and not only with safety, but often with

credit; so that many years after, when I was at home, and my brother and

I were looking over an old file of the paper, we found it much better

printed than either of us expected; as well printed, in fact, as if it

had been done on an old hand-press, instead of the steam-power press

which it vaunted the use of. The wonder was that, under all the

disadvantages, the paper was ever printed on our steam-power press at

all; it was little short of miraculous that it was legibly printed, and

altogether unaccountable that such impressions as we found in that file

could come from it. Of course, they were not average impressions; they

were the very best out of the whole edition, and were as creditable as

the editorial make-up of the sheet.