My earliest memories, or those which I can make sure are not the sort
of early hearsay that we mistake for remembrance later in life, concern
a country newspaper, or, rather, a country printing-office. The office
was in my childish consciousness some years before the paper was;
the compositors rhythmically swaying before their cases of type; the
pressman flinging himself back on the bar that made the impression,
with a swirl of his long hair; the apprentice rolling the forms, and
the foreman bending over the imposing-stone, were familiar to me when I
could not grasp the notion of any effect from their labors. In due time
I came to know all about it, and to understand that these activities
went to the making of the Whig newspaper which my father edited to
the confusion of the Locofocos, and in the especial interest of Henry
Clay; I myself supported this leader so vigorously for the Presidency
in my seventh year that it was long before I could realize that the
election of 1844 had resulted in his defeat. My father had already been
a printer for a good many years, and some time in the early thirties
he had led a literary forlorn hope, in a West Virginian town, with a
monthly magazine, which he printed himself and edited with the help of
his sister.
As long as he remained in business he remained a country editor and a
country printer; he began to study medicine when he was a young man,
but he abandoned it for the calling of his life without regret, and
though with his speculative and inventive temperament he was tempted to
experiment in other things, I do not think he would ever have lastingly
forsaken his newspaper for them. In fact, the art of printing was in
our blood; it never brought us great honor or profit; and we were
always planning and dreaming to get out of it, or get it out of us;
but we are all in some sort bound up with it still. To me it is now so
endeared by the associations of childhood that I cannot breathe the
familiar odor of types and presses without emotion; and I should not be
surprised if I found myself trying to cast a halo of romance about the
old-fashioned country office in what I shall have to say of it here.