“No,” said I, “I can well believe that.  Indeed, the turpentine that is in them is very good for certain sorts of diseases that are peculiar to children.  My wife will tell you so.”

But she did not.  She turned away in disdain and left the room; and since that time there is one episode in our life which we never refer to.  Hence the tide of our days flows by in deep and untroubled serenity.

[Very few married men have such an experience as McWilliams’s, and so the author of this book thought that maybe the novelty of it would give it a passing interest to the reader.]

MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE

I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen—­an unusually smart child, I thought at the time.  It was then that I did my first newspaper scribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation in the community.  It did, indeed, and I was very proud of it, too.  I was a printer’s “devil,” and a progressive and aspiring one.  My uncle had me on his paper (the Weekly Hannibal journal, two dollars a year in advance —­five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cordwood, cabbages, and unmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer’s day he left town to be gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the paper judiciously.  Ah! didn’t I want to try!  Higgins was the editor on the rival paper.  He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend found an open note on the poor fellow’s bed, in which he stated that he could not longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek.  The friend ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore.  He had concluded he wouldn’t.  The village was full of it for several days, but Higgins did not suspect it.  I thought this was a fine opportunity.  I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole matter, and then illustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wooden type with a jackknife—­one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water with a walking-stick.  I thought it was desperately funny, and was densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a publication.  Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece of gratuitous rascality and “see him squirm.”

I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the “Burial of Sir John Moore”—­and a pretty crude parody it was, too.

Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously—­not because they had done anything to deserve, but merely because I thought it was my duty to make the paper lively.