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Show Mark Twain's First Experience in Journalism. I waB a very smart child at the age of 13 an unUBiially smart ohild I thought at the time. It was then that I did my firat newspaper scribbling; scrib-bling; and, most unexpectedly to me, it stirred up quite a sensation in the community. It did, United; and I was very proud of it, too. I was a printer's "devil," and a progressive and aspiring one. My uncle had me on his paper (the Weekly Hannibal Journal, two dollars dol-lars a year in advance, 500 subscribers, subscrib-ers, and that paid in cord wood, cab-bages cab-bages and unmarketable turnips); and on a lucky summer's day he left town to be gone a week, and asked me it I thought I could edit one issue of the paper judiciously. Ah, didn't I want to try I Hinton was the editor of the rival paper. He was lately jilted, and one night a friend found n open note on the poor fellow's bed, iu which he stated that he could no lunger endure lile and had drowned himself in Bar creek. The friend ran down them and discovered Hinton wading bark to the shore. He had concluded he wouidn L - 'The village was full of it for soveral days, but Hinton did not suspect it. I thouRat this was a fine opportunity, I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole afiair, and then illustrated it with villainous wood cuts, engraved on the bottom of wood type with a jack-knife one of them a picture of Hinton wading out in the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding tbe depth of the water with a walking stick. I thought it was desperately fuuuy, and was densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a publication. Being satisfied with the effort, I looked about for other worlds to conquer, con-quer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting matter to charge the editor ol a neighboring county paper with a gratuitous piece of rascality, and see him squirm. I did it, putting the article in the form ot a parody on the "Burial of Sir John Moore;" and a crude parody it was, too. Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously not because they had done anything to deserve it, but because I thought it was my duty : i make the paper lively. Next I zantlv touched the newest strangor the lion ot the day the gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb cox-comb of the firit water, and the "loudest" dressed man in town. He was an inveterate lady-killer. Every week he wrote some poetr? for the Journal about bit newest con quest. His rhymes for my week were headed, "Mary in H 1," meaning "Mary in Hannibal," of course. Bat while Betting up the piece I was suddenly driven from bead to heel ! by what I regarded as a thunderbolt of humor,, and compressed it into a snappy foot-note at the bottom, thus: "We will 1st this thing pass this once; but we want Mr. Gordon Runnels Run-nels to understated distinctly that we have a character to sustain, and from this time forth, when ,he wants to communicate with his friends in h II, he must select some other medium than this journal." The paper, came out, and I never knew anything to attract so much attention as those playful trifles of mine. For once the Hannibal Journal Jour-nal was in demand a novelty it had not experienced before. The whole town was stirred. 1 Hinton dropped in with a double-barreled double-barreled shetguu early in the forenoon. fore-noon. When he found that it was an infant, as he called me, that had done the damage, be pulled my ears, and then went away; but be tbrew up the situation that Dight, and left the town for good. The tailor came with his goose and a pair of shears; but he despised me, too, and departed for the south that night. The lampooned citizens oame with threats of libel, and went away incensed in-censed at my insignificance. The country editor pranced in with a war whoop next day, suffering for blood to drink; hut be ended by forgiving for-giving me cordially and invited me down to the drugstore to wash away all animosity in a friendly bottle of "Fahnestock Lotion." It was his little juke. My uncle was very angry when he got back unreasonably so, I thought, considering what an impetus I had given the paper, and considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought to have been uppermost in bis mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel and getting his head shot ofl. But he softened when he looked at the accounts, and saw that I had actually booked the unparalleled number of thirty-three new subscribers, subscrib-ers, and had the vegetables to show (or it cord-wood, cabbages, beans and unsalable turnips enough to run the family lor two years. |