"I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen--an unusually smart child I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper scribbling and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation in the community. It did indeed 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 a year in advance-- five hundred subscribers and they paid in cord-wood cabbages and unmarketable turnips) and on a lucky summer's day he left town to be gone a week and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the paper judiciously. Ah! didn't I want to try! Higgins was the editor on the rival paper. He had lately been jilted and one night a friend found an open note on the poor fellow's bed in which he stated that he could no longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek. The friend ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore."