You must put him in a book or a play right away.  You are the only man capable of doing it.  You might die at any moment, and your very greatest work would be lost to the world.  I could write Orion’s simple biography, and make it effective, too, by merely stating the bald facts—­and this I will do if he dies before I do; but you must put him into romance.  This was the understanding you and I had the day I sailed.

Observe Orion’s career—­that is, a little of it:  (1) He has belonged to as many as five different religious denominations; last March he withdrew from the deaconship in a Congregational Church and the Superintendency of its Sunday School, in a speech in which he said that for many months (it runs in my mind that he said 13 years,) he had been a confirmed infidel, and so felt it to be his duty to retire from the flock.

2.  After being a republican for years, he wanted me to buy him a democratic newspaper.  A few days before the Presidential election, he came out in a speech and publicly went over to the democrats; he prudently “hedged” by voting for 6 state republicans, also.

The new convert was made one of the secretaries of the democratic meeting, and placed in the list of speakers.  He wrote me jubilantly of what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech.  All right—­but think of his innocent and pathetic candor in writing me something like this, a week later: 

“I was more diffident than I had expected to be, and this was increased by the silence with which I was received when I came forward; so I seemed unable to get the fire into my speech which I had calculated upon, and presently they began to get up and go out; and in a few minutes they all rose up and went away.”

How could a man uncover such a sore as that and show it to another?  Not a word of complaint, you see—­only a patient, sad surprise.

3.  His next project was to write a burlesque upon Paradise Lost.

4.  Then, learning that the Times was paying Harte $100 a column for stories, he concluded to write some for the same price.  I read his first one and persuaded him not to write any more.

5.  Then he read proof on the N. Y. Eve.  Post at $10 a week and meekly observed that the foreman swore at him and ordered him around “like a steamboat mate.”

6.  Being discharged from that post, he wanted to try agriculture—­was sure he could make a fortune out of a chicken farm.  I gave him $900 and he went to a ten-house village a miles above Keokuk on the river bank —­this place was a railway station.  He soon asked for money to buy a horse and light wagon,—­because the trains did not run at church time on Sunday and his wife found it rather far to walk.