to every cobweb and darkened the rattling casement.
Possibly I did not know enough. I forgot to say the office was not a
salaried one, but solely dependent upon fees. So while I was called
Judge Nye and frequently mentioned in the papers with consideration, I
was out of coal half the time, and once could not mail my letters for
three weeks because I did not have the necessary postage."

He wrote some letters to the Cheyenne _Sun_, and soon made such a
reputation for himself that he was able to obtain a position on the
Laramie _Sentinel_. Of this experience he wrote:

"The salary was small, but the latitude was great, and I was permitted
to write anything that I thought would please the people, whether it was
news or not. By and by I had won every heart by my patient poverty and
my delightful parsimony with regard to facts. With a hectic imagination
and an order on a restaurant which advertised in the paper I scarcely
cared through the livelong day whether school kept or not."

Of the proprietor of the _Sentinel_ he wrote:

"I don't know whether he got into the penitentiary or the Greenback
party. At any rate, he was the wickedest man in Wyoming. Still, he was
warmhearted and generous to a fault. He was more generous to a fault
than to anything else--more especially his own faults. He gave me twelve
dollars a week to edit the paper--local, telegraph, selections,
religious, sporting, political, fashions, and obituary. He said twelve
dollars was too much, but if I would jerk the press occasionally and
take care of his children he would try to stand it. You can't mix
politics and measles. I saw that I would have to draw the line at
measles. So one day I drew my princely salary and quit, having acquired
a style of fearless and independent journalism which I still retain. I
can write up things that never occurred with a masterly and graphic
hand. Then, if they occur, I am grateful; if not, I bow to the
inevitable and smother my chagrin."

In the midst of a wrangle in politics he was appointed Postmaster of his
town and his letter of acceptance, addressed to the Postmaster-General
at Washington, was the first of his writings to attract national
attention.

He said that in his opinion, his being selected for the office was a
triumph of eternal right over error and wrong. "It is one of the epochs,
I may say, in the nation's onward march toward political purity and
perfection," he wrote. "I don't know when I have noticed a