I
made $2.50 last Sunday."
There is a long description of a trip on the Fairmount stage in this
letter, well-written and interesting, but too long to have place here.
In the same letter he speaks of the graves of Benjamin Franklin and his
wife, which he had looked at through the iron railing of the locked
inclosure. Probably it did not occur to him that there might be points
of similarity between Franklin's career and his own. Yet in time these
would be rather striking: each learned the printer's trade; each worked
in his brother's office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly and
went to New York, and from New York to Philadelphia, as a journeyman
printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human, and
of incredible popularity.
Orion Clemens, meantime, had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa, and
located the family there. Evidently by this time he had realized the
value of his brother as a contributor, for Sam, in a letter to Orion,
says, "I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my
letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work dulls
one's ideas amazingly."
Meantime, he had passed his eighteenth birthday, winter was coming on, he
had been away from home half a year, and the first attack of homesickness
was due.
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