A LOFTY IDEAL.
“My own youth was not specially marked by advantages. There were none, unless you can call a small bookcase full of books, which my home contained, an advantage. The printing-office was my school from a very early date. My father thoroughly believed in it, and he had his belief as to work, which he illustrated as soon as we were old enough to learn the trade he followed. We could go to school and study, or we could go into the printing-office and work, with perhaps an equal chance of learning; but we could not be idle.”
“And you chose the printing-office?”
“Not wholly. As I recall it, I went to and fro between the schoolhouse and the printing-office. When I tired of one, I was promptly given the other.
“As the world goes now, we were poor. My father’s income was never above twelve hundred a year, and his family was large; but nobody was rich then. We lived in the simple fashion of that time and place.
“My reading, somehow, went on pretty constantly. No doubt my love for it won me a chance to devote time to it. The length varied with varying times.
“Sometimes I read but little. There were so many years of work—of over-work, indeed, which falls to the lot of many,—that I should be ashamed to speak of it except in accounting for the fact of my little reading. My father had sold his paper in Hamilton, and bought an interest in another at Dayton, and at that time we were all straining our utmost to help pay for it. In that period very few hours were given to literature. My daily tasks began so early, and ended so late, that I had little time, even if I had the spirit for reading. Sometimes I had to sit up until midnight, waiting for telegraphic news, and be up again at dawn to deliver the papers, working afterwards at the case; but that was only for a few years.”
ACQUIRING A LITERARY STYLE
“When did you find time to seriously apply yourself to literature?”
“I think I did so before I really had the time. Literary aspirations were stirred in me by the great authors whom I successively discovered, and I was perpetually imitating the writings of these,—modeling some composition of my own after theirs, but never willing to own it.”