For a long time I answered demands for “loans” and by next mail always received his check for the interest due me to date.  In the most guileless way he let it leak out that he did not underestimate the value of his custom to me, since it was not likely that any other customer of mine paid his interest quarterly, and this enabled me to use my capital twice in 6 months instead of only once.  But alas, when the debt at last reached $1800 or $2500 (I have forgotten which) the interest ate too formidably into his borrowings, and so he quietly ceased to pay it or speak of it.  At the end of two years I found that the chicken farm had long ago been abandoned, and he had moved into Keokuk.  Later in one of his casual moments, he observed that there was no money in fattening a chicken on 65 cents worth of corn and then selling it for 50.

7.  Finally, if I would lend him $500 a year for two years, (this was 4 or 5 years ago,) he knew he could make a success as a lawyer, and would prove it.  This is the pension which we have just increased to $600.  The first year his legal business brought him $5.  It also brought him an unremunerative case where some villains were trying to chouse some negro orphans out of $700.  He still has this case.  He has waggled it around through various courts and made some booming speeches on it.  The negro children have grown up and married off, now, I believe, and their litigated town-lot has been dug up and carted off by somebody—­but Orion still infests the courts with his documents and makes the welkin ring with his venerable case.  The second year, he didn’t make anything.  The third he made $6, and I made Bliss put a case in his hands—­about half an hour’s work.  Orion charged $50 for it—­Bliss paid him $15.  Thus four or five years of slaving has brought him $26, but this will doubtless be increased when he gets done lecturing and buys that “law library.”  Meantime his office rent has been $60 a year, and he has stuck to that lair day by day as patiently as a spider.

8.  Then he by and by conceived the idea of lecturing around America as “Mark Twain’s Brother”—­that to be on the bills.  Subject of proposed lecture, “On the, Formation of Character.”

9.  I protested, and he got on his warpaint, couched his lance, and ran a bold tilt against total abstinence and the Red Ribbon fanatics.  It raised a fine row among the virtuous Keokukians.

10.  I wrote to encourage him in his good work, but I had let a mail intervene; so by the time my letter reached him he was already winning laurels as a Red Ribbon Howler.

11.  Afterward he took a rabid part in a prayer-meeting epidemic; dropped that to travesty Jules Verne; dropped that, in the middle of the last chapter, last March, to digest the matter of an infidel book which he proposed to write; and now he comes to the surface to rescue our “noble and beautiful religion” from the sacrilegious talons of Bob Ingersoll.