Wanted to get nearer to
books and so hired myself to the country printer and newspaper at
13--great disappointment to the family, my mother having dreams of
my becoming a preacher--[hell of a preacher I would have made]. I
had meantime begun and finished as much as a page apiece of many
stories and books, several epic poems--but one day the Old Man went
home to dinner and left me only a scrap of "reprint" to set during
his hour and a half of absence. It was six or eight lines nonpareil
about the Russian gentleman who started to drive from his country
home to the city one evening in his sleigh with his 4 children.
Wolves attacked them and one by one he threw the children to the
pack, hoping each time thus to save the others. When he had thrown
the last his sleigh came to the city gate with him sitting in it a
raving maniac. That yarn had been going the rounds of print since
1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so
I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley
of long primer, composing the awful details as I set the type and
made it a thriller.
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