CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE LAST OF HIGH LIFE.

In writing this experience I disdain all intent of making myself out a first-class sufferer or adventurer. Other men by hundreds on our frontiers have endured far more, suffered far more, passed through many more perils and combated them more courageously. Mine as compared to theirs is a mere priming, a rush-light candle to an electric lamp. Our mountains and lone valleys hold many a skeleton whose unburied, unrecorded bones are the only relics and proofs of a live, lingering death, preceded by hours of pain and misery. Mine was the merest foretaste of their hardships and sufferings, and it is my chief desire that this story shall help to a clearer realization of the perils, hardships, and sufferings of our unknown pioneers. I passed a very comfortable night at the foot of my snowslide, save sundry aches in my three frozen toes. I have passed very many nights far more uncomfortably when surrounded by all the so-called comforts of civilization, in insect-infested beds at slovenly taverns, in rooms stifling with the midsummer heat of New York; in cold, fireless chambers with damp beds. Some of our civilization doesn’t civilize in the matter of comfort. Down there in my snow hole I was better off in regard to artificial heat than one-third the population of France, who, in their damp stone houses, shiver over a pot of coals from November till April, while thousands have not even this luxury. I had any amount of fuel about me, provisions for days, powder and shot, and if more snow came I had but to let it fall, build up the walls of my hole and protect me from the blasts. I knew of a man caught thus in a storm on the Summit, who made a hole for himself by kindling a fire on the snow, allowing it to melt, and going downward with it as it melted. When the storm ended his cavity was twice the size of a hogshead, and he emerged from it and came to our house in Eureka Valley. Snow rightly applied, will prove man’s greatest protector from cold, providing it is deep enough. It is the intensely cold blast sweeping over hard, frozen ground, that kills both animal and vegetable life.

I looked up at dawn, after finishing my breakfast, or rather the remains of the banquet which had continued at intervals all night—for there is nothing like eating and drinking to keep up one’s spirits and keep out the cold, and one strong cup of coffee under such conditions is worth a pint of whiskey, since it gives a renewal of vigor which doesn’t flash up and then out like alcohol. I looked on the contract before me. I had that three hundred feet of steep icy incline to climb. There was no getting round it by gradual or zigzag upward approaches. The way to the right and left broke off in ugly precipices. A little exploration to find an easier route satisfied me and sent me back frightened to my camp. For crossing on what I deemed snows with a firm foundation underneath, I was startled to find my pole running through this surface in an empty void beneath. Then the entire area for twenty feet square suddenly settled down an inch or two with an ominous scrunch! which sent my heart seemingly up in my mouth and my hair up on its various ends. I was walking on a frail crust of snow which had formed over the deep gorges ploughed by the rains and torrents of ages down the mountain side. Some of these were fifteen or twenty feet deep, with rocky sides almost perpendicular, and such pits, blocked up at either end with snow, were regular man-traps. I hauled myself up to the place from whence I had slipped the previous evening. The job occupied the entire morning. There were the two snowshoes, the pole and my pack to manage, besides my own earthly organization. In places the descent was so steep that I was obliged to drag myself and cargo upward a foot at a time, and then chock my feet with a knife to prevent slipping back. The moral of which is, it is easier to go down than to go up, and easier to fall than to rise in many ways. It does seem singular that these coincidences should be so coincident between the world of materiality and that of morality. It was a very laborious task, and when about noon I reached the top, I was sick from exhaustion, and lay down for some minutes on the ledge of snow hardly wide enough to hold me. Then, with shaky knees, I picked my way very slowly over another dangerous mile around the mountain-side, where every step was furnished with extra accommodation for slipping, and in many spots where, had I slipped, I should have gone farther and fared much worse than on the evening before. I wished I was a goose, for a goose could in four minutes have accomplished a distance which took me all day. We pride ourselves on our powers and the ways and means we have devised for transporting our clumsy carcases, but after all, in point of locomotion, we are individually miserably inferior to a goose, and all our ingenuity and mind has not been able only to lift us from the inferior position wherein nature has in this respect placed us, as compared with a goose.

I arrived at Hulse’s empty cabin about an hour before dark. The place looked melancholy, murderous, and cold. The locality was higher than ours in Eureka Valley, and not so well protected. Of the house little was visible save the ridgepole. Five feet of snow lay on the kitchen roof, which could easily be walked on. I gained entrance with some difficulty through the upper sash of a front window. The door was permanently barred for the winter by snow. I was no sooner in the house than the requirements of the situation drove me out again to collect fuel for the night. There was no rest for the wicked. It is only when man is entirely alone that he realizes how many things are necessary not only to his comfort but his very existence. A bear could have lain during the night in comfort at that house on a bed of straw. The assertion that “man wants but little here below” is not true, and should no longer pass uncontradicted. Here was I, at that time, a dweller in the wilderness with the foxes—a tramp, standing almost within the threshhold of beggary, owner neither of house nor lands, and a cipher “on change.” Yet I couldn’t get along without iron and steel, phosphorus and sulphur, or my matches, coffee from the tropics, sugar from the Indies, salt from somewhere, pepper from pepperland, grain ground to flour, chemicals to “raise it,” tea from China, and utensils of tin to keep it in. It is good to be so alone once in one’s life to realize how much man’s present development is due to the numberless articles he brings from all the ends of the earth for his subsistence and comfort, and what an endless amount of labor is necessary to keep him up to his present standard of development.

My fuel was pine bark, stripped from the surrounding trees. It came off easily in great sheets, making an imposing-looking pile as heaped in the kitchen, and burned like shavings. The night passed in alternate cat naps and firing up. I would doze, to wake up shivering, finding the room dark and the fire nearly out. Throwing on more bark, the flames leaped up. I dozed again, to wake up in cold and darkness as before. It was a gloomier camp than the one of the night previous. An empty house always has a tomb-like atmosphere about it, and, when alone, I prefer a bivouac under the trees. With morning came a heavy snowstorm, or rather a continuation of the snow that had been falling all winter. I started out. The pine boughs along the road brushed my face, where, in summer, they would have been many feet over my head. The strap of one of my snowshoes tore out of the wood, and left me crippled as to further progress until I repaired it. The snow was soft, and to get off the shoes was to sink in it to the middle. I was literally afloat on a sea of snow, and to get overboard was to founder and flounder—another proof of man’s miserable helplessness as compared with the goose. It began to occur to me that this storm was one of unusual severity. It blew violently, and the snow at times came in such whirls that I could not open my eyes for several seconds. If I had not in this story determined, in point of detail, to reduce everything to a rigid mathematical accuracy of statement, I might say that the snow blinded me for minutes, since seconds seem very long under these circumstances. Time seems to be a quality or a something, which, in point of length or shortness, is largely dependent on one’s condition and sensations. A good time is always short—a bad time always long.

The aim on starting that morning was to reach Strawberry Flat, fourteen miles distant. There is no road over the Sierras without its Strawberry Flat, generally so called because no strawberries are ever found there. This Strawberry Flat, then, contained a population of four men, and was regarded by us in Eureka valley as a bustling place. In two hours I gave up all idea of reaching Strawberry Flat, and I concentrated my hopes on an empty house four miles below Hulse’s. Given good weather and a crust on the snow, I could with tolerable ease have made the fourteen miles between Hulse’s and Strawberry. But the wind was ahead, the snow constantly blinded me, and as it came much more horizontally as driven by the blast than perpendicularly, and being of a sleety nature, formed at intervals of every few minutes a slim film of ice on my face, which, as with my hand I swept it off, fell to the ground in broken ice casts of my ordinary countenance. The empty house was at last reached. It was past noon. The empty house was not there. Where it once stood was more empty than ever. The weight of the snow had crushed the shanty. A few timbers and splinters sticking out told the story. There was but one thing to do—return to Hulse’s. To go forward was impossible, and so I fought my way back. It was a hard fight, for the wind and the snow at times seemed as if inspired by the demons of the air or some spirit cause or effect which is expressed by such term. They beat and buffeted and blinded me, so that twice I lost my way, blundered about in circles, and got back to Hulse’s about three in the afternoon only through the wandering of sheer stupidity or the guidance of some special providence—perhaps both. Tired as I was it was necessary to go straightway to work and get in more pine bark for the night. There was no lack of business on this trip. I never had a moment to spare from morning till night. One’s body is an imperious master, and, unsupported by civilization or the help of one’s fellow-beings, it keeps one on the keen jump to supply it with food, fuel, and cover.

As I lay stretched in my blankets before the blaze that night I heard from time to time a sharp crack overhead. I gazed upward and made a most unpleasant discovery. It was another form of Damocles’ sword over me. The rafters were bent like bows from the great pressure of the snow on the roof. The cracking was a notice that they might not stand the strain much longer. The roof might at any time tumble in with several tons of snow upon me. This weight was steadily increasing. I could not go out in the storm, nor could I remove the snow from the roof. The situation kept my mind busy while the body was at rest, and anxiety and suspense are about as wearing as toting in pine bark after snow-shoeing all day in a snowstorm. Hulse’s was my home and anxious seat for two days. The sword of Damocles hung and cracked, but did not fall. I found Hulse’s store of provision under the boards of the front room floor. The boards were weighted down by a great pile of shingles. It was this monument of shingles in the parlor which caused me to suspect the existence of the cache. Taking from the big box I found underneath a renewed supply of flour and pork, and breaking the face of Hulse’s family clock, also packed therein, a matter never revealed until this present writing, I re-closed it, buried it, boarded it over and re-piled the shingles over it.

On the fourth morning of this excursion the storm was over, the sky clear, the heavens brightly blue, and the newly fallen snow had dressed the pines all in new suits. For the second time I bade Hulse’s lone house a doubtful farewell, for after travelling all day I had before succeeded only in bringing up there at night, and knew not but that I might do so again. The newly fallen snow being very light and feathery, I made slow progress. A frozen crust grants the best track for snowshoes. As the sun got higher it melted this feathery top snow, fusing it into a close, sodden mass, which stuck and bunched on the bottoms of the shoe runners. This delayed me still more. Other troublesome obstacles were the little rivulets and brooks, which, cutting through the snow, left banks on either side six or seven feet in height. To climb these was difficult. The snow gave way, and one could only flounder through and up to the top. Besides, it was necessary to wade the creeks. This wet my feet and caused more snow to bunch and freeze on them. Night came, and with it an increase of cold, which, causing the snow to freeze to a crust on top, iced and smoothed the track anew for me. But with one additional facility for making progress, I lacked another. That was the strength and freshness with which I had started at morn.

My day had been one of most laborious progress, wading creeks, floundering through their soft snowbanks, and stopping every ten minutes to clean my shoes of damp snow. I had no other grease for their bottoms save a bit of pork, which I wore out upon them. Snowshoes won’t run well unless frequently greased. Then there was no rest for my body. The supply of pines from about whose roots the snow had melted away had given out; to step off the shoes was to sink to the middle; to rest at all was to rest squatting; a few minutes’ trial of this position under the most favorable circumstances will convince any reader of its back-aching tendencies. Man is a lying animal; I mean he must lie down to recuperate. My meals I cooked on the snow. The regular menu was coffee, bread, and pork. The base of the kitchen was a big piece of dry pine bark, always at hand. On this the fire was kindled. The evolution of coffee under these conditions was slow, because the water for making it had first to be melted from snow in the coffee-pot, and snow under these circumstances melts with an exasperating slowness. The quantity required to make a single pint of water is something remarkable. I think I was obliged to fill that vessel four or five times with snow to get the suitable quantity of water. Then it must be remembered that the water would not proceed to boil until all the snow was melted. “A watched pot never boils,” but a watched pot of plain water is velocity itself when compared with a pot of snow and water watched by a tired and hungry being in the wilderness. Night found me twelve miles from Strawberry Flat. About one in the morning I found another empty cabin. This was four miles from the desired haven. It was desolation inside and out—the windows gone, the door torn from its hinges, the inside a litter of snow and rubbish, and one dead cow in the kitchen. The cooking-stove remained. I cleared the grate of snow and attempted a fire. It wouldn’t draw. Of course it wouldn’t draw, for the stovepipe was full of snow. Then I kindled the fire on the top of the stove and gradually burned up a portion of the house. Like Sherman and Napoleon, I lived on the country invaded. The firelight cast its ruddy glow on the surrounding domestic desolation and the red dead cow, which, being frozen hard as a rock, served for a seat. I waited for the morn; but the morn would not come. I saw from the sashless windows the preliminary streaks of dawn ever so faintly lighting up the eastern horizon full forty times, and found they were only in my imagination, so covetous for the coming day. When the sun did rise he came up in the opposite direction.

Impatient of waiting longer, and converting myself to the false belief that the light was really coming in what turned out to be the west, I did battle in the dark with the last four miles of the journey. All went well until I reached a certain point in the road, which was now well defined through the trees. There every time I brought up in a clump of bushes and lost the track. Back, time after time, I went, seeking with careful calculation to make a fresh and truer start, only to bring up again in brambles and briers. When the light did come, I had, for two hundred yards, in this going and coming, beaten a path in the snow which looked as if travelled over for a week. Daylight showed what a ridiculously trifling turn had caused me thus to miss the route. The moral of which is that man’s welfare is often wrecked on some trifling error. A failure to say, “Good morning” to an acquaintance, a long, gloomy countenance or putting one’s knife in the mouth, or guzzling down soup or coffee with undue noise, has repelled one man from another, and such repulsion has sent our fortunes on the wrong track altogether. I was welcomed at the Strawberry House by six hounds, who, in the still faint light, made at me as they would at another beast, and the first few moments of my arrival on this outpost of civilization was occupied in energetic attempts to keep what was left of me from being eaten by the dogs. Indeed, the way of the transgressor is hard. I had never injured these dogs. However, the hospitality I experienced at Palmer’s stood out in bold relief against the churlishness of their brute creation.

CHAPTER XXIX.

ON THE ROSTRUM.

On reaching Sonora, Tuolumne County, with the frozen toes alluded to in the great slide down the mountain, I went to work and dug post-holes for a living. Inspired by the posts or the holes, I wrote what I called a lecture. This I learned by heart. Next I practised its delivery in the woods, behind barns, and sometimes at early morn in the empty Court-house—for the Temple of Justice in Sonora stood open night and day, and he that would might enter and sleep on the benches, or even in the bar itself, as many did in those days. Many weeks I drilled and disciplined this lecture, addressing it to rocks, trees, barns, and sometimes to unseen auditors wandering about, whose sudden appearance would cover me with confusion and send me blushing home. But I dreaded bringing it to an engagement with the enemy—the audience. The glories and triumphs of oratory I eagerly coveted, but the preliminary labor, the pangs and the terrible chances of speaking in public I dreaded and avoided as long as possible. But Destiny, despite all our backwardness, steadily pushes us on to the most painful experiences. I required yet feared the living audience. Rocks, trees, and barn doors will not do for a speaker the specific work of a few listening human beings. Listening ears sooner or later teach a man who would speak to multitudes to modulate his voice or increase it to a volume, or spend more time and strength in accentuating each syllable; and above all, to take things coolly and not get hurried. At last I concluded to risk myself on an experimental audience. I borrowed one for the occasion. Going into the main street of Sonora one evening, I collected half a dozen appreciative souls and said, “Follow me to the Court-house; I would have a few words with you.” There was a County Clerk, his deputy, a popular physician and saloon-keeper, and an enterprising carpenter. They followed me wonderingly. Arrived at the Court-house I seated them, marched myself to the Judge’s bench, stuck two candles in two bottles, lit them, and then informed the crowd that I had brought them hither to serve as an experimental audience to a lecture I proposed delivering. After which I plunged into the subject, and found that portion of the brain which with a speaker always acts independent of the rest wondering that I should be really talking to live auditors. There is a section of a man’s faculties, during the operation of speaking in public, which will always go wandering around on its own hook, picking up all manner of unpleasant thoughts and impressions. Apparently it is ever on the watch to find something which shall annoy the other half. It seems to me that no one can become a very successful speaker or actor until this idle, vagrant part of the mind is put down altogether, total forgetfulness of all else save the work in hand be established, and self-consciousness abolished. However, I spoke half the piece to my borrowed audience, and then, feeling that I could really stand fire, told them they could go home. But Dr. ——, constituting himself spokesman, rose and declared that having served as hearers for half the lecture they thought they were entitled to the other half. Being thus encored, I gave them the other half. A great apprehension was now taken from my mind. I could speak to a crowd without forgetting my lines, and deemed myself already a lecturer if not an orator. I did not then realize how vast is the difference between mere speaking and the properly delivering of words and sentences to a multitude, be it large or small; how unfit are the tone, pitch, and manner of ordinary converse to public speaking; how a brake must be put on every word and syllable, to slow down its accentuation and make it audible in a hall; how great the necessity for deliberation in delivery; how the force and meaning of entire sentences may be lost by a gabbling, imperfect, and too rapid enunciation; how the trained speaker keeps perfect control of himself, not only as to his delivery, but the mood underneath it; which should prompt how much depends on the establishment of a certain chain of sympathy betwixt speaker and audience, and how much the establishment of such chain depends on the speaker’s versatility to accommodate himself to the character, intelligence, moods, and requirements of different audiences. I state this, having since my debut in the Sonora Court-house learned these things, and learned also that Nature has not given me the power to surmount all these difficulties. I am not a good speaker, as many doubtless discovered before I did. However, my friends whom I consulted said by all means give the lecture in public, knowing, of course, that I wanted them to encourage me, and feeling this to be the best way of getting rid of me. So I had posters printed and commenced public life on a small field. I hired a hall; admittance twenty-five cents. I felt guilty as I read this on the bills. I read one alone furtively by moonlight, because after they were posted and the plunge taken I was ashamed to appear by daylight on the streets. It seemed so presumptuous to ask respectable, God-fearing citizens of that town to sit and hear me. This was a result of the regular oscillations of my mental and temperamental seesaw.

I was always too far above the proper scale of self-esteem one day and too far below it the next. The real debut was not so easy as the preliminary, borrowed, bogus one. There were the hard, stern, practical people present, who counted on receiving their regular “two bits” worth of genuine, solid fact, knowledge and profitable information, who discounted all nonsense, didn’t approve of it and didn’t understand it. I felt their cold and withering influence as soon as I mounted the platform. Not many of such hearers were present, but that was enough to poison. I saw their judgment of my effort in their faces. I weakly allowed those faces, and the opinions I deemed shadowed forth on them, to paralyze, psychologize and conquer me. I allowed my eyes, numberless times, to wander and meet their stony, cynical gaze, and, at each time, the basilisk orbs withered up my self-assertion and self-esteem. Becoming more and more demoralized, I sometimes cowardly omitted or forgot what I deemed my boldest matter and best hits. However, the large majority of the audience being kindly disposed toward me, heard, applauded and pronounced the lecture a “success.” Some ventured, when it was over, to advise me that the subject-matter was much better than the manner of its delivery. Of that there was not the least doubt. In speaking, I had concentrated matter enough for two hours’ proper delivery into one, and a part of the mental strain and anxiety during the lecture was to race my words so as to finish within the limits of an hour on time. I feared wearying the audience, and so took one of the best methods of doing so. The next day self-esteem, going up to fever-heat, and my comparative failure not being so bad as the one I had anticipated when my estimates of myself were at zero, I determine on pressing my newly-found vocation and “starring” Tuolumne County. Carried by this transient gleam of self-conceit beyond the bounds of good judgment, and overwhelmed with another torrent of composition, I wrote still another lecture, and advertised that. The curiosity, complaisance, and good-nature of my friends I mistook for admiration. Indeed, during the fever, I planned a course, or rather a constant succession of lectures which might, if unchecked, have extended to the present time. But, on the second attempt, I talked largely to empty benches. A character of audience I have since become accustomed to, and with whom I am on terms of that friendship and sympathy only begotten of long acquaintance. The benches were relieved here and there by a discouraged-looking hearer who had come in on a free ticket, and who, I felt, wanted to get out again as quickly as possible. Then, I knew that my friends did not care to hear me any more. This was bitter, but necessary and useful. People will go often to church and hear dull sermons because of custom, of conventionality, and of religious faith and training. They will attend political meetings during an exciting campaign and hear equally dull political speeches because of patriotic or partisan sympathy or fealty. They will go also to hear noted people because of curiosity, but they will not hear more than once a mere man unbolstered by any of these outside influences. I next gave the lecture at Columbia. Columbia, though but four miles distant, was then the rival of Sonora as the metropolis of Tuolumne County, and it was necessary to secure a Columbian indorsement before attempting to star it through the provincial cities of Jimtown, Chinese Camp, Don Pedro’s, and Pine Log. I billed Columbia, hired the theatre for two dollars and a half, and, after my effort, had the satisfaction of hearing from a friend that the appreciative and critical magnates of the town had concluded to vote me a “success.” Then I spoke at Jamestown, Coulterville, Mariposa, Snelling’s and other places, with very moderate success. Perhaps I might have arisen to greater distinction or notoriety than that realized on the Tuolumne field had I better known that talent of any sort must be handled by its possessor with a certain dignity to insure respect. Now, I travelled from town to town on foot. I was met, dusty and perspiring, tramping on the road, by people who knew me as the newly-arisen local lecturer. I should have travelled in a carriage. I posted my own bills. I should have employed the local bill-sticker. I lectured for ten cents per head, when I should have charged fifty. Sometimes I dispensed with an admittance fee altogether and took up contributions. In Coulterville, the trouser-buttons of Coultervillians came back in the hat, mixed with dimes. Looking back now on that experience, I can sincerely say to such as may follow me in any modification of such a career, “Never hold yourself cheap.” If you put a good picture in a poor frame, it is only the few who will recognize its merit. Don’t let your light shine in a battered, greasy lamp. It’s all wrong. We all know the dread that genius inspires when clad in a seedy coat. Lecturing frequently tries a man’s soul; especially when the lecturer’s career is not a very successful one. If his path be strewn with roses and success, there may not be much of a story to tell. But it is different when his path is strewn with thorns and he steps on them. It is sad to hire a hall in a strange village and wait for an audience which never comes. It is ominous to hear your landlord, just before supper, remark, “Our people don’t go much on lecters. But they’ll pile into a circus or menagerie or anything else that isn’t improvin’.” They say this all over the land. It is sadder when you offer him a handful of your free tickets for himself and family to hear him, “Guess the folks hain’t got time to go to-night. There is a ball over to Pappooseville, and everybody’s goin’.” I never did bill myself yet in a village for a lecture, but that I happened to pitch on the night of all nights when some great local event was to take place. Or else it rained. It is sad to speak to thirty-two people in a hall large enough to hold a thousand and try to address those thirty-two people scattered about at the thirty-two points of the mariner’s compass. Once in New York I spoke to a fair audience in a hall on the ground floor. Things went on beautifully till 9 o’clock, when a big brass band struck up in the bigger hall over my head and some fifty couples commenced waltzing. It was an earthquake reversed. It ruined me for the night. None can realize until they enter the lecture field what trivial occurrences may transpire to upset the unfortunate on the platform and divert and distract the attention of an audience. On one occasion a cat got into a church where I was speaking, and trotted up and down a course she had laid out for herself before the pulpit. She did this with an erect tail, and at times made short remarks. It is singular that a single cat acting in this manner is more effective in interesting and amusing an “intelligent audience” than any speaker. Under such conditions Cicero himself would have to knock under to the cat. He might go on talking, but the cat would capture the house. And then the awful sensation of being obliged to keep on as though nothing had disturbed you; to pretend you don’t see such a cat; that you are not thinking of it; and knowing all the while that your audience are getting their money’s worth out of the cat and not out of you! On another fearful occasion I was speaking at Bridgehampton, Long Island, on the subject of temperance. I lectured on temperance occasionally, though I never professed teetotalism—for any length of time. One can lecture on temperance just as well without bring a total abstainer—and perhaps better. Now, I was born and they attempted to bring me up properly near Bridgehampton. Every one knew me and my ancestors, immediate and remote. I had not spoken over ten minutes when a man well-known in the neighborhood and much moved by the whiskey he had been drinking all day, arose and propounded some not very intelligible queries. I answered him as well as I could. Then he put more. Nay, he took possession of the meeting. No one ventured to silence him. They are a very quiet, orderly people in Bridgehampton. Such an interruption of a meeting had never before been heard of there, and the people seemed totally unable to cope with the emergency. The wretch delivered himself of a great variety of remarks, but ever and anon recurred to the assertion that “he’d vouch for my character, because he not only knew me, but my parents before me.” “He was present,” he said, “at their wedding, which he remembered well from the fact of wine being served there, as well as rum, gin, and brandy.” That for me was a laborious evening. Sometimes I spoke, and then the inebriate would get the floor and keep it. He rambled about the aisles, allayed a cutaneous disturbance in his back by rubbing himself against one of the fluted pillars, and, when I had at last finished, made his way up to the choir and, interpolating himself between two damsels, sang everything and everybody out of tune from a temperance hymn-book.

CHAPTER XXX.

RUNNING FOR OFFICE.

This is the confession of a political villain; not, however, a perjured political villain. I never swore to run for office for my country’s good. I did run once for an office for my own good. I was unsuccessful. Virtue has its own reward; so has vice. The wicked do not always flourish like green bay trees. Indeed, judging from a home experience, I am not prepared to say that they flourish at all. The fall political campaign of 1866-67 came on while I was carrying my comic lecture about the camps of Tuolumne, Stanislaus, and Mariposa. A thought one day took possession of me, “Why not run for the Legislature?” I belonged to a political party. My frozen toes troubled me a good deal and the lecture did not pay much over expenses. I consulted with one of the pillars of our party. He belonged in Oak Flat. I took the pillar behind Dan Munn’s store on Rattlesnake Creek and avowed my intention. The pillar took a big chew of tobacco, stared, grinned, and said: “Why not?” I consulted with another pillar behind Bob Love’s store in Montezuma. He was throwing dirt from a prospect-hole with a long-handled shovel. He leaned on the shovel, blew his nose au natural without artificial aid, grinned, and after some deliberation said: “Why not?” I found another pillar of our party slumming out a reservoir near Jamestown. He was enveloped in yellow mud to his waist, and smaller bodies of mud plastered him upward. A short pipe was in his mouth and a slumgullion shovel in his hand. He said: “Go in for it and win.”

With less assurance and more fear and trembling I consulted with other and more influential party pillars in Sonora, the county town. Some hesitated; some were dignified; some cheered me on; some said, “Why not?” I made the same remark to myself, and replied, “Why not?” The Assembly was a good gate for entering the political field. My ideas of its duties were vague. Of my own qualifications for the post I dared not think. They may have been about equal to those with which I entered the Henry’s galley as a sea cook. But what matter? Other men no better qualified than I had gone to Sacramento, received their $10 per diem and came back alive. I could do that. They seemed to stand as well as ever in the estimation of their constituents. Then “Why not?” The die was cast. I announced myself in the county paper as a candidate for the State Assembly. The County Convention assembled at Sonora. It was a body distinguished for wisdom and jurisprudence. Judge Ferral of our city was there. He was then a bright-eyed, active, curly-haired youth, and had already given much promise of his successful career. Judge Leander Quint was there. H. P. Barber presided. Tuolumne County had not then been shorn of its brightest lights by the necessities of the rest of the State and the world. Somebody nominated me. I arose and paid somebody else five dollars. This was the first price of ambition. Then I found myself making my nominating speech. It was a very successful speech. I left out politics altogether, made no pledges, discussed no principles and talked no sense. At first the audience stared. Then they laughed immoderately. So did I. Then they nominated me by acclamation. It was one of the proudest moments of my life, although I did not know it at the time. Taken for all in all, it was no wonder they laughed. I was obliged to laugh myself at the whole affair behind the Court-house when the Convention adjourned. And “Why not?”

It was the laugh of a fiend! I wanted the position for the per diem. I was buried in turpitude. My colleagues were all running on principle to save the country. It is singular that the motive of such a wolf in sheep’s clothing as I was at that time was not detected. The great and good men, secure in their own rectitude and purity of purpose, by whom I was surrounded, never once guessed at the presence of the snake in their grass. Looking back at this occurrence after the lapse of nearly twenty-five years, I am more and more astonished that the party should have risked taking such a load as myself on its shoulders. I had no position, no standing, next to no reputation, no property, no good clothes, no whole shoes, no fixed habitation and three sore toes. I had not nor did not realize the responsibilities of a citizen. I had no family and could not realize the duties and responsibilities of those who were rearing young citizens for the great Republic. Should such a man be sent to the State Legislature? Of course not. Are such men ever sent? Of course not. I do not think now that at the period spoken of I was even incorruptible. Should a person who seldom saw over ten dollars in his possession at any one time be sent where he might be “approached” by designing men? Of course not. Was such an one ever sent? Never! The commonwealth of California ran a fearful risk in my nomination.

Few, probably none, suspected the mental misery I endured during this campaign. Because I knew and felt my turpitude. I knew my unfitness for the position to which I aspired. I knew where lay the snake in the grass. Could I meet daily a trusting, credulous constituency, who believed that my mind was full of projects for the relief of the State and nation, without remorse? Of course not. I had remorse—bad, but I dared not back out and off the track. So I kept on, and the vultures gnawed my vitals. Those who think the wicked have such a good time are sadly mistaken. Our party was firmly grounded on one grand belief. It was that nothing the other party could do was right, and nothing that we did was wrong. This at that time I did not believe. But I pretended to. Or rather I stifled all thought on the subject. This was the first great sin. Unlike my colleagues, I was untrue to my own convictions. They——but how I wished for their faith. It could move mountains of doubt. Mine couldn’t. How I hated my conscience. It tormented me worse than a chronic colic. There I was standing shoulder to shoulder with patriots—battling bravely for a cause, a principle, while I—I cared for naught save a seat in the Assembly at $10 a day.

It was a stirring campaign, that of 1866, in and about Tuolumne County. The antagonism was of the bitterest character. Political opponents reviled each other in print and sometimes peppered each other with pistols. Bullets flew about night and day. It was dangerous in Sonora to sleep in a clapboarded house in the average line of aim. The papers left nothing unsaid which could taunt and irritate. Editors went about the streets weighed down by masked batteries. It was calculated that 500 pounds of iron were daily packed about the streets in the shape of derringers, knives, and revolvers. The champions of the opposing parties never met on the highway but that people peered and squinted from door and window for the bombardment to commence. Knives were bathed in gore. Barroom floors showed bloody stains. Men died with their boots on. Loaded shotguns lay in ambush behind front and back doors. The atmosphere smelt of blood and possible killing. Saloon plate-glass mirrors showed the track of pistol bullets. Mass meetings were assemblages of men from town and country, secretly armed. People spent most of their time hating each other. Ministers went behind the orthodox returns and preached sectional and partisan politics. The more vital tenets of religion were suspended for the time being with the writ of habeas corpus. I canvassed the county with my comic lecture. It took. It was popular with both parties. It was a pleasant relief from the heavier logic and argument used by heavier and more solid speakers. It was like the farce after the tragedy. It sent assemblies and mass meetings home in good humor. Nobody asked if such a candidate was fit to make laws. But there Tuolumne showed wisdom.

They didn’t want any more laws made. Everybody who had been sent to the Legislature since California was created a State had been busy putting more laws on the statute books. There was an overplus. People couldn’t keep count of the laws already made. Tuolumne then showed wisdom in its endeavor to send one man to the Legislature of 1866-67 who, not being able to draw up a bill, could not have added a single new law to the mass already made. I gave my party a great deal of trouble. Once in a private conversation with one I deemed a friend, although he belonged to the opposition, I committed myself in favor of greenbacks as a legal tender. Our party did not approve of greenbacks. Ours was the old-fashioned hardmoney dollar of our dad’s party. I was hardly aware of this, through a lamentable ignorance of what we really did advocate. The County Central Committee, hearing of my treason, sent after me a messenger with a missive calling on me to explain. I saw then the horrible blunder I had made, and wished the earth would open and swallow me. Then I concluded to resign or to run away. But a man bolstered me up and advised me to deny the report, which I did in an open mass meeting. The use of paper then would have doubled the amount of money in circulation, and that seemed to me just what the people needed. Every mother’s son of them on being questioned said they wanted more money, and here seemed a means of relieving that want. But the party refused to put in a plank which might have doubled the dollars in everybody’s pockets.

Feeling that I had not done justice to the party in making an active canvass of the county, principally because I had no money to make a canvass with, by treating long lines of ever-ready patriots at every bar in Tuolumne, I concluded I would hold a series of private mass meetings in the day time on horseback. I would do this on election day. I would gallop from poll to poll and make a speech at each poll. I had a route laid out embracing half the county. I made the initial equestrian speech at Jamestown. Thence I galloped to Shaw’s Flat. Shaw’s Flat upset me. The pillar of our party there, at whose saloon the polls were held, came to his door while I was speaking, took one look at me and walked off in disgust. I saw the disgust on his face an inch thick. It smote me. It threw a wet blanket over all this newly-roused enthusiasm. I started for Columbia, but all the way that man’s face peered into mine. It robbed me of all courage and confidence. I had no further heart to continue the work. It was not at all the regular thing. It was an innovation on old party usages. The country even then was too old for such politico-equestrian heroics. I rode back to Jamestown, put the horse in his stable, and hid myself. The people did not agree to send me to Sacramento. Perhaps it was fortunate for them they did not. Probably it was for me. Whatever happens to a man in this life is probably the best thing for him, inasmuch as nothing else can happen to him. I had the profit of an experience in making a semi-political debut, and the people profited by sending another man.

Could the past but be recalled, with all its conditions, contingencies, and accessories; could I once more renew this episode with the advantage of years of experience and accumulated wisdom, I might succeed and fill the post of legislator. But the future is apt to come too late. To be sure it was for me a period of folly and weakness. My soul even now squirms with shame to think of it. “And it should,” I hear my fellow-human judges saying. Of course it should. Man’s first duty to himself is to hide his follies and bear himself as though he never committed any. Only I can afford to tell what a wretch I have been. Were I a candidate for office I could not. Some day, when the world is wiser, will men cease strutting about in their masks of propriety and wisdom, and publish their own past errors as freely as now they do those of their fellows? Is it a good preliminary previous to entrance into that world where “all things shall be revealed,” where each action lies in its true nature, and where each one of us must “even to the teeth and forehead of our faults give in evidence.” “Why not?”

CHAPTER XXXI.

AN EARLY CALIFORNIA CANVASS.

Previous to this election which did not elect me, Williams and I canvassed the county together. He aspired to the office of Sheriff. We mounted our horses, and with long linen dusters on our backs and bottles of whiskey in our pockets, rode first to Spring Gulch, consisting of two groceries, six saloons, an empty hotel, twenty miners’ cabins, a seedy school-house, a seedier church, the hillsides around denuded of earth, torn and scarred by years of hydraulic washing, and showing great patches of bare yellow ledge covered with heaps of boulders. The few men met were in coarse, ragged, gray shirts and mud-stained duck pants, had a worn, worked-out look; over all shining the hot afternoon sun, the heated atmosphere quivering and rising, behind the hill-bounded horizon, a snow-white mass of cloud which, at precisely the same hour every afternoon, attains the same altitude, then gradually sinks. The eye gazes steadily upon it; there are seen great hollows and depths of shining whiteness. It is the vapor coming from the melting snow on the Sierra peaks eighty miles away. The few loungers about the Washington Saloon see William Saunders and myself riding down the hill. Our dusters and clean linen proclaim us as “candidates.” Candidates means drinks. There is a gradual concentration of unemployed seediness at the Washington. We dismount; soon the coveted and cheering bottle is placed on the bar; a line of tumblers in skirmishing order form behind it; every one within sight and hearing is called up; a pause of glad anticipation ensues while the glasses are being filled; the precision of bar-room etiquette is strictly observed, that not a drop be swallowed until all are ready; then the dozen tumblers are simultaneously raised; the standing toast “Here’s luck,” and the reviving alcohol fulfils its mission. This is electioneering.

Sam White is the Bismarck of our interests in Spring Gulch. He is the standing delegate to the County Convention from this precinct. He goes by virtue of a paying claim, a capacity for venturing among the rocks and shoals of saloons, gaming tables and innumerable calls to drink, without losing his head. He can drink deeply, quietly, and fearfully; he can drink himself into noise and turbulence and still keep a set of sober faculties in reserve underneath. We hold a short cabinet meeting with Sam behind the barn. He sees clearly the political complexion of Spring Gulch. Bob O’Leary is doubtful, but may be bought; Jack Shear and Tom Mead must be braced up to allegiance by whiskey; Miles and O’Gorman are mad because a favorite of theirs could not get the nomination for Supervisor last year, and won’t vote anyhow; Bob Jones is favorable to us, but wants to leave before the primary meeting comes off; the rest are sure for us or sure against us.

We visit the Franklin House just opposite. The political candidate’s money must not all be spent in one house. This is one of the fundamental principles in electioneering. Every saloon controls a few votes, or rather a few whiskey-sodden organizations, who are voted like machines. The solemn ordeal of an American treat is again witnessed. Jim Brown becomes affectionately and patriotically drunk, and as we ride away loudly proclaims himself a “white man and in favor of a white man’s government.”

We feel that Spring Gulch is secure. We carry it in our pocket. We ride a couple of miles over the ridge to Six-Bit Gulch. Red crags tower upward for hundreds of feet; a rivulet flows along, and on a little flat under a spreading live-oak is an old log cabin. In front is a bit of vegetable garden inclosed by old sluice lumber. High up in the branches overhead a gauze-covered meat-safe; on the trunk is nailed a coffee-mill; under it hangs a frying-pan; close by the washtub and wash-board a few fowl peck about; the quail in a clump of chaparral near by are querously twittering, scolding and fluttering, and making the preliminary arrangements for their night’s rest.

Sam Lugar, gray and worn, resident in this gulch for the last sixteen years, sits outside the door smoking his evening pipe.

A hundred yards above is the residence of the “Judge,” another hard-working, whiskey-drinking hermit. A glance within shows the Judge eating his evening meal. A child is playing about on the mud floor, whose creamy complexion and bright bead-like eyes indicate its Indian origin. Hanging above the fire-place are a gun, an Indian bow, a quiver full of glass-tipped arrows; on the shelf bits of gold-studded quartz, a bunch of crystals, petrifactions, and curiously-shaped stones found by the “Judge” from time to time in his diggings. There are boxes full of old magazines and newspapers; on the rude window-sill a coverless, well-worn copy of Shakespeare. The Judge is tall, straight, and sallow in complexion. He has lived on this spot since 1849. Six-Bit Gulch was very rich. He has torn up virgin gold in the grass roots. He lives now on recollections of the flush times. Present failures and long past successes form the staple of his conversation. His mining is merely secondary to another occupation, the great aspiration of his life—to beat a poker game over in Spring Gulch. He has been unsuccessfully trying this for the last seven years. A bundle of aboriginal duskiness enveloped in a bright calico gown, hanging about her adipose proportions, stirs as we enter. That is the Judge’s wife—a squaw. Her family down to the third generation, are camped in the brush hard by. They visit the Judge at stated intervals, and at such times the family expenses are trebled. The gray shirt and duck pants tied at the waist with a string constitute the Judge’s only dress-suit. On the floor near him is a shapeless, wet mass of India rubber boots, shirt and pants, drenched and splashed with yellow mud. This man was once a spruce clerk in a New England store. At seventeen, the set and whiteness of his collars, the fit of his boots, the arrangement of hair and neck-tie were subjects of long and painful consideration before the mirror. He had his chosen one among the village girls; he saw her regularly home from the Sunday-evening prayer-meetings. The great gold fever of 1848 seized him. He saw a vision: A few months picking up nuggets in California; a triumphant return home; a wedding; a stylish mansion; a fast horse; a front pew; termination, a marble monument in the Terryville cemetery: “Beloved and respected by all who knew him, he sleeps in hope of a still brighter immortality.”

We stop at the “Judge’s” for the night. Wife and child are sent off to the Indian camp in the chaparral. Sam Lugar drops in after supper. The Judge is an incessant talker. The bottles and glasses are placed on the table. The Judge becomes fatherly as to counsel and admonition against excess in drink. Also against gambling. He has peculiar theological views. Moses, he says, was a keen old miner. He and Aaron put up a plan to gain all the gold in the Israelites’ possession. While Moses was on Mount Sinai receiving the stone tables, Aaron was counselling the making and worship of the golden calf. By such means did he concentrate in a lump all the Jews’ jewelry. What then? Moses comes down, sees the calf, gets angry, breaks into pieces, burns it up. But what becomes of the gold? Didn’t Moses and Aaron sneak around that night and “pan it out” of the ashes?

The Judge is his own theologian.

We visit Price, of Hawkins’ Bar. Price is now the sole constituency of Hawkins’. He ran this bar in its golden infancy; he saw it in its youth; he is steadfast to it in its decay. Thirty-four years ago, eight hundred men lived here; the Tuolumne banks were lined with them, shaking their cradles. From the top of yonder red hill the combined grating of the pebbles shaken in hundreds of rocker-sieves sounded like the crash of machinery in a cotton mill.

Old Hawkins first discovered gold here. Price tells of the pickle-jars full he had buried under the floor of his cabin. The secret could not be kept. They came trooping down the steep Red Mountain trail, blankets and tools on their backs, footsore, weary, thirsty, hungry—but hungrier still for gold. They put up tents and brush houses, or crept, slept and cooked under projecting rocks; they stood all day in ice-cold water; they overworked bodies hitherto unused to manual labor; they blistered delicate hands; they lived on bacon and heavy bread of their own making; they drank raw whiskey by the quart; they died, and were buried almost where they died, in nameless graves. Up yonder, but a few yards in the rear of Price’s cabin, is the old camp graveyard. The fence is rotting away and stands at various angles. The inscriptions on the headboards are half effaced by time and the elements. Some are split and have fallen down. Read “Jacob Peiser, æt. 27.” He died close by in the gulch hard by, with a pistol-bullet through him. A dispute over a claim. “Samuel Purdy, 31.” Drowned trying to cross the river during a freshet. “John Wilkins, æt. 35.” Killed by a cave in the bank claim about a hundred yards away. “Samuel Johnson, æt. 25.” He dove with a sand bag to stop a great leak in the Ford Chann’s head wall, and he stopped the leak in part with his own body, for the stream sucked him in the crevice and he never came up alive. “John Weddell, 35.” Blown up by the premature explosion of a blast in the Split Rock quartz claim. “Abram Hewison, 45.” Delirium tremens, stark mad at midnight, jumped into the river from the point yonder, where the stream whirls round the bend with tremendous force and then rushes down toward the long deep cañon a mile away in a succession of great white crested billows, whose sad, never-ceasing murmur seems an eternal requiem for those lying here.

Price has seen all this. That was the climax of his life. Price’s heaven is not in the future. It is in the past. It is embraced in a period about twenty-five years ago, when he made “an ounce per day.” Those, he remarks, were times worth living for. Eight hundred souls then at Hawkins’; five gambling houses in full blast every night; music, dancing, and fandangos at either end of the bar.

The river roars unvexed toward the sea. It has burst through its dams and choked the races with sand. The scars and furrows on the hill sides are quite hidden by the thickly growing vegetation; young oaks and pines are coming up in the place of the old. Trail and road are overgrown with brush. Among the rank weeds we stumble on traces of man’s former presence—the top of a saloon counter, the mahogany leg and faded green cushion of a billiard table, rusty tin ware, broken picks and shovels, a few rude stone chimneys, about whose blackened fire-places years ago gathered the hopeful, sanguine men of “’49.” It is so still. The declining afternoon sun is throwing long shadows from the mountains on the other bank. Slowly they creep up and shade the steeps on our side. Every moan and babble of the Tuolumne falls distinctly on the ear.

“Civilization” here put in a transient appearance. It scarred the hill sides with pits and furrows dug for gold. It cut down the wide-spreading symmetrical oaks. It forced the Tuolumne through race and flume from its channels. It built gaudy temples dedicated to the worship of Bacchus, resplendent with mirrors, pictures, and cut-glassware, located on the very site where a few months previous stood the Indian’s smoking wigwam. It brought toiling men, hard-fisted, awkward, ungainly, clumsy, with all grace and suppleness worked out of them and strong only to lift and dig. It brought all manner of men, educated and ignorant, cultivated and coarse, yet for whom Christian training, Christian Church, Christian Bible, Christian spire in city, town, and village pointing heavenward, had failed to convince that gold was not the chief aim and end of all human effort. By day there was labor drudging, labor spasmodic, a few prizes, many blanks, some hope, much more discouragement. By night, revelry, carousal, gambling, oaths, recklessness, pistol shots, knife thrusts, bloodshed, death. Bird and beast fled affrighted to lonelier and more secure retreats before the advent of the raging, cruel animal man.

But now civilization has flown and nature seems easier and somewhat improved by its absence. Price is ours. He will walk nine miles on election day to Chinese Camp, the nearest precinct, to deposit a ballot for us. An order on the proprietor of the Phœnix Saloon for a generous supply of whiskey stimulates his devotion to his country. What a glorious land of liberty is this! See in the clear azure sky above us, floating a mere speck, the eagle, the bird of freedom! He poises himself for a swoop. He comes rushing down on quivering pinion. Nearer! nearer! It is a turkey buzzard, who has scented a dead horse.

Constituencies can only be found where civilization rages.

CHAPTER XXXII.

ANOTHER CHANGE.

It was the sharpest corner I had ever turned in my life. It led into a new road, a new life, new associations, new scenes, and eventually new countries.

And this change came sudden, unexpected at the “darkest hour” and like “a thief in the night.”

San Francisco had changed greatly since I had left it eight years previous. Much of the old “’49” characteristic had disappeared or was disappearing. The roughness in garb and manner had abated, the high silk hat topped more masculine heads, the afternoon feminine promenade on the main shopping streets was more elegantly attired, “society” was classifying itself into sets and “circles” more or less pretentious, many more men had homes to rest in at night, the glare and splendor of the openly public gambling house had gone, the revolver as an outside garniture of apparel had disappeared.

I could write with some facility. In other respects, I was awkward, unassimilative with the new element about me, and what is called “shy and retiring” which really implies a kind of vanity demanding that the world shall come and pet you without your having the courage to boldly face it and assert your place in it or whatever you may think your place. I was afraid of being quizzed or made a mark of ridicule by others, and any pretentious fop could with ease make me take a back seat and make me keep my mouth shut. One night Mr. Lawrence invited me to call with him on a noted actress. I refused out of pure dread. Dread of what? Of an opinion I had previously manufactured in my own mind of what the actress might think of me; when I should probably have been of about as much importance to her as a house fly. The consequence which we shy and retiring people attach to ourselves in our secret mind is ridiculously appalling.

Mr. Lawrence remained in San Francisco but a few months after my advent on the Era. While he stayed he did all in his power to give me, socially and otherwise, a good “send off.” He introduced me to aspiring and successful people, placed me in good material surroundings and opened for me the door to a successful element. That was all he could do, and in my estimation about all one person can do to really advance the fortunes of another.

But when he left I descended, hired the cheapest lodgings, lived on the cheese-paring plan, and was thereby brought mainly into contact with that cheap element in human nature which longs for the best things in the world, is willing even in some way to beg for them, looks on the prosperous with envy and aversion and expends most of its force in anxiety or grumbling, instead of devising ways and means to push forward.

So for the most part I did. I accepted the lowest remuneration for my services, deeming it the inevitable, went figuratively hat in hand to those who bought my articles, and brought my mind at last to think they had done me a great favor on paying me my just dues. I was always expecting starvation or failure of some sort and for that very reason got a near approach to it. My cheap lodgings brought me a sneak thief who stole the first decent suit of clothes I had worn for years in less than forty-eight hours after I had put them on. My associations brought me people who were always moaning over their luck, living mentally in the poorhouse, and therefore we mutually strengthened and supported each other on the road to what was little better than the poorhouse.

Like them, I never thought of being else than a worker for wages, and ran away mentally at any idea of taking responsibilities. Like them I regarded the class who did, as living in a world I never could reach. Like them I regarded the only sure and safe haven was a “job,” or situation at steady, regular wages.

So, for years I had indifferent luck, and lived a good deal on the threadbare side of life. The cause and the fault lay entirely in myself. Industriously, though unconsciously I sat down on myself, punched myself into corners; as I in mind accepted the bottom of the heap as the inevitable I stayed near the bottom.

If I should live that and previous portions of my life over again, I should probably do the same thing. Because I believe there is a truth in predestination. In other words, when you are in a certain mental condition your physical life and fortune will be an exact correspondence or material reflection of that condition. When you grow out of that condition and get a different mind your surroundings, fortunes, and associations will be in accordance with that state of mind. Thank Heaven, we can grow. But the I that existed twenty-five years ago was predestined to meet the fortunes it did twenty-five years ago, and those fortunes could only change as the mind of that “I” changed.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

EDITING VS. WRITING.

I knew there was a difference between “editing” a paper and writing for one, but how much of a difference I did not realize until my destiny placed me temporarily in charge of the Sunday supplement of a city daily, which, in accordance with the regulations, or rather exactions, of modern journalism, published a Sunday paper, or rather magazine, of sixteen pages. I had about forty-six columns to “edit.”

To “edit” is not to write. I speak thus plainly for the benefit of the many young men and maidens who are to swell the ranks of the great army now industriously engaged in sending contributions to the editor’s waste basket, and who still imagine that the editor does nothing but write for the paper.

I pause here a moment to ask where, at the present increase of size and amount of matter published, are our Sunday papers to stop. Already the contents of some Sunday issues amount to more than that of the average monthly magazine.

While this competition is going on at such a lively and increasing rate between newspaper publishers to give the most reading matter for the least money, I wonder if the idea may not in due course of time strike them that they may be giving to those who read more than they can really read and digest.

Our business men to-day do not read one-half the contents of the daily paper. They have only time to glance at them. They would really be much better suited could some device of journalism give them their news in readable print in the compass of a handkerchief, and give them no more.

I entered on my duties in a blissful ignorance of the trials that awaited me. I did not know how to “put a head” on an article or a selected “reprint.” I know nothing of the hieroglyphics necessary to let the printer know the various kinds of typo in which my headings should be set up. I did not realize that the writer’s manuscript must be, in a sense, ground through the editor’s mill and go through a certain process before being put in the printer’s hands. I did know that something was to be done, but the extent of that something I did not know. Of the signs to be placed on manuscript to show whether the type used should be “brevier” or “minion” or “agate,” or those to designate “full-face caps” for my upper headings and “full-face lower case” for my lower headings, of a “display heading,” of “balancing the columns,” nor that the headings on a page should not be jammed up together or too far apart. I was in that condition of ignorance that the smallest part of a printer was justified in looking down on me with contempt.

N. B.—In the composing room a printer is a much larger-sized Indian than a mere writer.

You who read the instructive and entertaining columns of ghastliness, accident, and crime in your morning paper—you who are unfortunately or otherwise neither writers nor printers, you think you could easily write one of those staring sensational headings over the article which tell all about it before you read it and whet your appetite for reading it. But you might not. It is not so much the literary ability needed. It is the printer who stands in the way. It is the printer who must have just so many words for one kind of “head” and so many for another. You must get your sense, sensation, and information condensed into say twenty-four or twenty-six words for one part of the “head” and ten or twelve for another part, and these must neither run over nor run under these numbers. If they do and the spaces are uneven that issue of the paper would, in that printer’s estimation, be ruined. If you, the editor, do not “make up” your pages so that the columns “balance,” the paper, for him, would be a wreck. The foreman of the composing room values a newspaper for its typographical appearance. This is right. A paper, like a house, should look neat. Only the foreman need not forget that there is something in the articles besides types. The magnate of our composing room called all written matter “stuff.” “What are you going to do with this stuff?” he would remark, and he used to put such an inflection of contempt on that word “stuff” that it would have made any but an old tough writer sick to hear him. Poems literally perspiring with inspiration, beautiful descriptive articles reeking with soul and sentiment, lively humor, manuscript written and re-written so lovingly and carefully—children of many a brilliant brain—all with him was but “stuff”!

During all the years that I had been writing I had bestowed no attention on the “making up” of a paper. I had a vague idea that the paper made up itself. I had passed in my articles, and had seen them in their places a few hours later, and never dreamt that the placing of these, so that the columns should end evenly or that the page should not look like a tiresome expanse of unbroken type, required study, taste, and experience.

I was aroused from this dream when first called on to “make up” my eight-page supplement. Of course, the foreman expected me to go right on like an old hand, and lay out in the printed form where the continued story should be and how many columns it should fill, where the foreign correspondence and illustrated articles should appear, where the paste pot and scissored matter, shorter articles, and paragraphs should be, so that the printer could place his galleys in the form as marked out per schedule.

I was confronted within a single week with all this mass of my own editorial and typographical ignorance, and even more than can here be told. It had not before dawned upon me that an editor should be—well, we will say, the skeleton of a printer. I was not even the ghost of one. I was not before aware that in the recesses of editorial dens and composing rooms the printer stood higher than the writer. “Everybody” writes nowadays. But “everybody” does not set type or “make up” papers.

I saw then what I had done. I saw that I had rashly assumed to govern a realm of which I was entirely ignorant. I made a full and free confession to our foreman. I put myself before him as an accomplished ignoramus. He was a good fellow and helped me through. It was tough work, however, for several weeks. As Sunday came nearer and nearer, my spasms of dread and anxiety increased. I was seized in the dead of night with fears lest I had not sent up sufficient “stuff” to fill my forty-six columns. Then I would be taken with counter fears lest I had sent up too much, and so run up an overplus on the week’s composing bill. I worried and fretted so that by Saturday night I had no clear idea at all or judgment in the matter, and let things take their own course.

But the hardest task of all was dealing with the mourners—I mean the manuscript bearers. I found myself suddenly inside of the place, where I had so often stood outside. I was the man in the editorial chair, the arbiter of manuscript destiny, the despot who could accept or reject the writer’s article. But I was very uncomfortable. I hated to reject anybody’s writings, I felt so keenly for them. I had so many times been there myself. I wished I could take and pay for everybody’s manuscript. But I could not. The requirements of the paper stood like a wall ’twixt my duty and my sympathy. The commands from the management allowed only a certain amount to be expended weekly for original articles. I felt like a fiend—an unwilling one—as I said “No” time after time and sent men and women away with heavy hearts. In cases I tried even to get from the rejected a little sympathy for myself. I told them how hard it was for me to say “No.” I tried to convince them that mine was a much harder lot than theirs, and that mine was by far the greater misery.

And how many times after I had suffered and rejected the MSS. did I try to answer in a manner satisfactory to them this question: “Did I know of any newspaper or magazine that would be likely to accept their matter?” How I tried to say that I did not, in a cheerful, consoling, and encouraging manner, in a manner which would convey to them and fill them with the idea that the town was full of places yawning and gaping for their articles, until they were outside of my office themselves, when I was willing that the cold unwelcome truth should freeze them.

Then I received letters asking for the return of manuscript. On entering on my duties I found the shelves piled with them—legacies left me by various predecessors—whether read, accepted, or rejected, I could not find out. But there they lay roll on roll—silent, dust covered. It seemed a literary receiving vault, full of corpses.

It was a suggestive and solemn spectacle for a young writer to look upon. Those many pounds of manuscript—articles which might make a sensation if printed—truths, maybe, which had not yet dawned on the world—all lying unread, dead, cold and unpublished.