boy’s hands had found work which his boy’s heart did joy to have done.  He soon mastered the compositor’s art, became a remarkably rapid composer.  As he set up the thoughts of others, he was not slow in discovering thoughts of his own demanding utterance.  The printer’s apprentice felt the stirrings of a new life.  A passion for self-improvement took possession of him.  He began to read the English classics, study American history, follow the currents of party politics.  No longer could it be said of him that he was not an apt pupil.  He was indeed singularly apt.  His intelligence quickened marvelously.  The maturing process was sudden and swift.  Almost before one knows it the boy in years has become a man in judgment and character.  This precipitate development of the intellectual life in him, produced naturally enough an appreciable enlargement of the ego.  The young eagle had abruptly awakened to the knowledge that he possessed wings; and wings were for use—­to soar with.  Ambition, the desire to mount aloft, touched and fired the boy’s mind.  As he read, studied, and observed, while his hands were busy with his work, there was a constant fluttering going on in the eyrie of his thoughts.  By an instinct analogous to that which sends a duck to the water, the boy took to the discussion of public questions.  It was as if an innate force was directing him toward his mission—­the reformation of great public wrongs.  At sixteen he made his first contribution to the press.  It was a discussion of a quasi-social subject, the relation of the sexes in society.  He was at the impressionable age, when the rosy god of love is at his tricks.  He was also at a stage of development, when boys are least attractive, when they are disagreeably virile, full of their own importance and the superiority of their sex.  In the “Breach of the Marriage Promise,” by “An Old Bachelor,” these signs of adolescence are by no means wanting, they are, on the contrary, distinctly present and palpable.  But there were other signs besides these, signs that the youth had had his eyes wide open to certain difficulties which beset the matrimonial state and to the conventional steps which lead to it, and that he had thought quite soberly, if not altogether wisely upon them.  The writer was verdant, to be sure, and self-conscious, and partial in his view of the relations of the sexes, but there was withal a serious purpose in the writing.  He meant to expose and correct what he conceived to be reprehensible conduct on the part of the gentler sex, bad feminine manners.  Just now he sees the man’s side of the shield, a few years later he will see the woman’s side also.  He ungallantly concludes “to lead the ‘single life,’ and not,” as he puts it, “trouble myself about the ladies.”  A most sapient conclusion, considering that this veteran misogynist was but sixteen years old.  During the year following the publication of this article, he plied his pen with no little industry—­producing