ss; how anxiously, my boy was
too young to know. He only felt the relief that the whole family felt
for a while at getting out of the printing business; the boys wanted to
go into almost anything else: the drug-business, or farming, or a
paper-mill, or anything. The elder brother knew all the anxiety of the
time, and shared it fully with the mother, whose acquiescence in what
the father thought right was more than patient; she abode courageously
in the suspense, the uncertainty of the time; and she hoped for
something from the father's endeavors in the different ways he turned.
At one time there was much talk in the family of using the fibre of a
common weed in making paper, which he thought he could introduce;
perhaps it was the milk-weed; but he could not manage it, somehow; and
after a year of inaction he decided to go into another newspaper. By
this time the boys had made their peace with the printing business, and
the father had made his with the Whig party. He had done what it must
have been harder to do than to stand out against it; he had publicly
owned that he was mistaken in regard to Taylor, who had not become the
tool of the slaveholders, but had obeyed the highest instincts of the
party and served the interests of freedom, though he was himself a
slaveholder and the hero of an unjust war.

It was then too late, however, for the father to have got back his old
newspaper, even if he had wished, and the children heard, with the
elation that novelty brings to all children, old or young, that they
were going away from the Boy's Town, to live in another place. It was a
much larger place and was even considered a city, though it was not
comparable to Cincinnati, so long the only known city in the world.

My boy was twelve years old by that time, and was already a swift
compositor, though he was still so small that he had to stand on a chair
to reach the case in setting type on Taylor's inaugural message. But
what he lacked in stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he got
the name of "The Old Man" from the printers as soon as he began to come
about the office, which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His
first attempt in literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing
nature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or
seventh year; and the printing-office was in some sort his home, as well
as his school, his university. He could no more remember learning to
set type than he cou