Editorial Wild Oats

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Editorial Wild Oats, by Mark Twain

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Title: Editorial Wild Oats
Author: Mark Twain
Release Date: October 6, 2006 [EBook #19484]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Editorial Wild Oats
BY
Mark Twain
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS--MCMV

Copyright, 1875, 1899, 1903, by SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.
Copyright, 1879, 1899, by SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.
Copyright, 1905, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
All rights reserved.
Published September, 1905.
[Illustration: See p. 57
"I FANCIED HE WAS DISPLEASED"]

Contents
PAGE MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE 3
JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE 11
NICODEMUS DODGE--PRINTER 30
MR. BLOKE'S ITEM 41
HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER 52
THE KILLING OF JULIUS C?SAR "LOCALIZED" 70

Illustrations
"I FANCIED HE WAS DISPLEASED" Frontispiece
"HE HAD CONCLUDED HE WOULDN'T" Facing p. 4
"GILLESPIE HAD CALLED" " 24
"WHEEZING THE MUSIC OF 'CAMPTOWN RACES'" " 38
"I HAVE READ THIS ABSURD ITEM OVER" " 50
"A LONG CADAVEROUS CREATURE" " 58
"THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE POCKETS" " 82
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's Note: The dialect in this book is transcribed exactly as| |in the original. | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+

Editorial Wild Oats

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 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. 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 no 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 villanous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wooden type with a jack-knife--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."
[Illustration: "HE HAD CONCLUDED HE WOULDN'T"]
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 it, but merely because I thought it was my duty to make the paper lively.
Next I gently touched up the newest stranger--the lion of the day, the gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb of the first water, and the "loudest" dressed man in the State. He was an inveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy "poetry" for the Journal, about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my week were headed, "TO MARY IN H--L," meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course. But while setting up the piece I was suddenly riven from head to heel by what I regarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humor, and I compressed it into a snappy footnote at the bottom--thus:
"We will let this thing pass, just this once; but we wish Mr. J. Gordon Runnels to understand distinctly that we have a character to sustain, and from this time forth when he wants to commune with his friends in h--l, he must select some other medium than the columns of this journal!"
The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so much attention as those playful trifles of mine.
For