rtising in about the same proportion, and
thus he created one absolute and unassailable certainty--to wit: that
the business would never pay him a single cent of profit. He took me out
of the "Courier" office and engaged my services in his own at three
dollars and a half a week, which was an extravagant wage, but Orion was
always generous, always liberal with everybody except himself. It cost
him nothing in my case, for he never was able to pay me a penny as long
as I was with him. By the end of the first year he found he must make
some economies. The office rent was cheap, but it was not cheap enough.
He could not afford to pay rent of any kind, so he moved the whole plant
into the house we lived in, and it cramped the dwelling-place cruelly.
He kept that paper alive during four years, but I have at this time no
idea how he accomplished it. Toward the end of each year he had to turn
out and scrape and scratch for the fifty dollars of interest due Mr.
Johnson, and that fifty dollars was about the only cash he ever received
or paid out, I suppose, while he was proprietor of that newspaper,
except for ink and printing-paper. The paper was a dead failure. It had
to be that from the start. Finally he handed it over to Mr. Johnson, and
went up to Muscatine, Iowa, and acquired a small interest in a weekly
newspaper there. It was not a sort of property to marry on--but no
matter. He came across a winning and pretty girl who lived in Quincy,
Illinois, a few miles below Keokuk, and they became engaged. He was
always falling in love with girls, but by some accident or other he had
never gone so far as engagement before. And now he achieved nothing but
misfortune by it, because he straightway fell in love with a Keokuk
girl. He married the Keokuk girl and they began a struggle for life
which turned out to be a difficult enterprise, and very unpromising.

To gain a living in Muscatine was plainly impossible, so Orion and his
new wife went to Keokuk to live, for she wanted to be near her
relatives. He bought a little bit of a job-printing plant--on credit, of
course--and at once put prices down to where not even the apprentices
could get a living out of it, and this sort of thing went on.

[Sidenote: (1853.)]

I had not joined the Muscatine migration. Just before that happened
(which I think was in 1853) I disappeared one night and fled to St.
Louis. There I worked in the composing-room of the "Evening News" for a
time, and then s