In my early teens, I formed a fancy for contributing to the newspapers: my callow youth might be my plea for bad judgment. I remember the first article—the first I had written—that met my vision in the columns of a journal. It was an essay at criticism on the performance at one of the city theatres of the tragedy of "Ion." It was execrable, of course, though I am bound to say that it did not so impress me at the time. When I recognized it, I was thrilled. I have never since experienced any such intensity of emotion from the same cause. A week or two later, I published some sentimental verses, of the worst possible sort, with but a feeble recurrence of the sensation. Still, I had tasted blood.
From that day, periodically, I used, with the greatest stealth, to drop into the outside box of the newspaper, which had printed my virgin effort, some marvellous product of my unfledged mind. I do not think I was ever detected in the act of slipping a manuscript into the box. I should have been overwhelmed with confusion, if I had been caught; so true is it that modesty is vanity subverted. The editor was ignorant of the authorship of the articles: he did not require the name, concealed by a signature, and nothing would have induced me—those were indeed my salad days—to ask for pay. I got this through the editorial inquiry as to my identity, and through the interest excited by some of my college companions, several of whom I generously took into my confidence. I am amazed now that the stuff I wrote should have been printed. It had all the most flagrant vices of sophomorical composition. Then I never dreamed of writing regularly, or trying to earn money by it, at any future time. It was an amusement, a kind of lark, such as breaking windows, or pulling down sign-boards.
Several years after I had left college—I was graduated at sixteen—I was invited to take the place of a young friend of mine on a daily paper, and my acceptance sealed my doom. I have never since quite cleansed my fingers of ink, though it is a good while since I have liked my trade. Just before the war, when I was connected with the Cincinnati Press, half a dozen of us young fellows were city editors, dramatic critics, and general utility men combined, on different papers there, and had things pretty much our own way. Such extraordinary paragraphs, sketches, and articles as we were wont to print, then, seem wellnigh incredible now. They comprised every form of heresy, expressed in the most stilted, euphuistic language imaginable; for our manuscript was never supervised. We wrote around rather than upon a subject. A vulgar suicide was embellished with supernatural rhetoric, and our private views on the topic, invariably commending the custom, and quoting the ancient stoics in support of it. Fires were described in choicest fustian, and elopements done in maudlin sentiment and extreme cynicism, mingled in equal parts. Murders were treated from within as well as from without. The motives, probable and possible, were conjectured: we acted in advance as judge, jury, temperament, and destiny. The right to take life was exhaustively discussed with every correlative issue. Quotations were given from the philosophers from Plato and Plotinus to Hegel and Emerson. All the poets between Hesiod and Lowell, all the romancers and novelists of every
