From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them hard work, and it is said he raised on the price.  At all events, the second concluded the series.  They are mainly important in that they are the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first for which he received a cash return.

He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857.  That winter in Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable association—­one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens’s general interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain views and philosophies which he never forgot.

He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace people, with one exception.  This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly unlike him—­without humor or any comprehension of it.  Yet meeting on the common plane of intellect, the two became friends.  Clemens spent his evenings in Macfarlane’s room until the clock struck ten; then Macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in Philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended.

Macfarlane had books, serious books:  histories, philosophies, and scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary.  He had studied these and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker.  He never talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery.  He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in the evening.  His hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew.  He would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out that would betray Macfarlane’s trade; but this never happened.

What he did learn was that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher besides.  He had at least one vanity:  the claim that he knew every word in the English dictionary, and he made it good.  The younger man tried repeatedly to discover a word that Macfarlane could not define.

Perhaps Macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for he never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his companion never tired of listening.  This Scotch philosopher did not always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and strikingly on his own account.  That was a good while before Darwin and Wallace gave out—­their conclusions on the Descent of Man; yet Macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy.  He went even further:  Life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a few microscopic seed-germs—­from one, perhaps, planted by the Creator in the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on