"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 cord-wood 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."