The journeyman of that time and place was much better than the printer
whom we had known earlier and in a more lax civilization, who was
too apt to be sober only when he had not the means to be otherwise,
and who arrived out of the unknown with nothing in his pocket, and
departed into it with only money enough to carry him to the next
printing-office. If we had no work for him it was the custom to take
up a collection in the office, and he accepted it as a usage of the
craft, without loss of self-respect. It could happen that his often
infirmity would overtake him before he got out of town, but in this
case he did not return for a second collection; I suppose that would
not have been good form. Now and then a printer of this earlier sort
appeared among us for a little time, but the air of the Western Reserve
was somehow unfriendly to him, and he soon left us for the kindlier
clime of the Ohio River, or for the more southerly region which we
were ourselves sometimes so homesick for, and which his soft, rolling
accent so pleasantly reminded us of. Still, there was something about
the business--perhaps the arsenic in the type-metal--which everywhere
affected the morals as it was said sometimes to affect the nerves.
There was one of our printers who was a capital compositor, a most
engaging companion, and of unimpeachable Western Reserve lineage, who
would work along in apparent perpetuity on the line of duty, and then
suddenly deflect from it. If he wanted a day off, or several days, he
would take the time, without notice, and with a princely indifference
to any exigency we might be in. He came back when he chose, and offered
to go to work again, and I do not remember that he was ever refused.
He was never in drink; his behavior was the effect of some obscure
principle of conduct, unless it was that moral contagion from the
material he wrought in.
I do not know that he was any more characteristic, though, than another
printer of ours, who was dear to my soul from the quaintness of his
humor and his love of literature. I think he was, upon the whole, the
most original spirit I have known, and it was not the least part of
his originality that he was then aiming to become a professor in some
college, and was diligently training himself for the calling in all the
leisure he could get from his work. The usual thing would have been to
read law and crowd forward in political life, but my friend despised
this common ideal. We were both studying Latin, he quite by himself, as
he studied Greek and German, and I with such help as I could find in
reciting to a kindly old minister, who had forgotten most of his own
Latin, and whom I do not now wish to blame for falling asleep over the
lessons in my presence; I did not know them well enough to keep him up
to the work. My friend and I read the language, he more and I less, and
we tried to speak it together, to give ourselves consequence, and to
have the pleasure of saying before some people’s faces what we should
otherwise have said behind their backs; I should not now undertake to
speak Latin to achieve either of these aims. Besides this, we read a
great deal together, mainly Shakespeare and Cervantes. I had a task of
a certain number of thousand ems a day, and when I had finished that I
was free to do what I liked; he would stop work at the same time, and
then we would take our Don Quixote into some clean, sweet beech-woods
there were near the village, and laugh our hearts out over it. I can
see my friend’s strange face now, very regular, very fine, and smooth
as a girl’s, with quaint blue eyes, shut long, long ago, to this _dolce
lome_; and some day I should like to tell all about him; but this is
not the place. When the war broke out he left the position he had got
by that time in some college or academy farther west and went into
the army. One morning, in Louisiana, he was killed by a guerrilla
who got a shot at him when he was a little way from his company, and
who was probably proud of picking off the Yankee captain. But as yet
such a fate was unimaginable. He was the first friend of my youth;
he was older than I by five or six years; but we met in an equality
of ambition and purpose, though he was rather more inclined to the
severity of the scholar’s ideal, and I hoped to slip through somehow
with a mere literary use of my learning.