amusements, wants
to go a-fishing in Canada--to be gone a month--and, if you wish, you can
during his absence sub for him."

It was just to my hand and liking. Before Alexander Starbuck returned
the leading editor of the paper fell from a ferryboat crossing the Ohio
River and was drowned. The next day General Starbuck sent for me and
offered me the vacant place.

"Why, general," I said, "I am an outlawed man: I do not agree with your
politics. I do not see how I can undertake a place so conspicuous and
responsible."

He replied: "I propose to engage you as an editorial manager. It is as
if building a house you should be head carpenter, I the architect. The
difference in salary will be seventy-five dollars a week against fifteen
dollars a week."

I took the place.

II

The office of the Evening Times was a queer old curiosity shop. I set to
and turned it inside out. I had very pronounced journalistic notions
of my own and applied them in every department of the sleepy old
money-maker. One afternoon a week later I put forth a paper whose oldest
reader could not have recognized it. The next morning's
Cincinnati Commercial contained a flock of paragraphs to which the
Chattanooga-Cincinnati-Rebel Evening Times furnished the keynote.

They made funny reading, but they threw a dangerous flare upon my "past"
and put me at a serious disadvantage. It happened that when Artemus Ward
had been in town a fortnight before he gave me a dinner and had some of
his friends to meet me. Among these was a young fellow of the name of
Halstead, who, I was told, was the coming man on the Commercial.

Round to the Commercial office I sped, and being conducted to this
person, who received me very blandly, I said: "Mr. Halstead, I am a
journeyman day laborer in your city--the merest bird of passage, with
my watch at the pawnbroker's. As soon as I am able to get out of town I
mean to go--and I came to ask if you can think the personal allusions to
me in to-day's paper, which may lose me my job but can nowise hurt the
Times, are quite fair--even--since I am without defense--quite manly."

He looked at me with that quizzical, serio-comic stare which so
became him, and with great heartiness replied: "No--they were damned
mean--though I did not realize how mean. The mark was so obvious and
tempting I could not resist, but--there shall be no more of them. Come,
let us go and have a drink."

That was the beginning of a friendship wh