After some financial stress, the paper was moved into the Clemens home, a “two-story brick”; and here for several years it managed to worry along, spasmodically hovering between life and death. Life was easy with the editors of that paper; for if they pied a form, they suspended until the next week. They always suspended anyhow, every now and then, when the fishing was good; and always fell back upon the illness of the editor as a convenient excuse, Mark admitted that this was a paltry excuse, for the all-sufficing reason that a paper of that sort was just as well off with a sick editor as a well one, and better off with a dead one than with either of them. At the age of fifteen he considered himself a skilled journeyman printer; and his faculty for comedic portrayal had already betrayed itself in occasional clumsy efforts. In 'My First Literary Venture', he narrates his experiences, amongst others how greatly he increased the circulation of the paper, and incensed the “inveterate woman-killer,” whose poetry for that week's paper read, “To Mary in H--l” (Hannibal). Mark added a “snappy foot--note” at the bottom, in which he agreed to let the thing pass, for just that once; but distinctly warning Mr. J. Gordon Runnels that the paper had a character to sustain, and that in future, when Mr. Runnels wanted to commune with his friends in h--l, he must select some other medium for that communication! Many were the humorous skits, crudely illustrated with cuts made from wooden blocks hacked out with his jack-knife, which the mischievous young “devil” inserted in his brother's paper. Here we may discern the first spontaneous outcroppings of the genuine humorist. “It was on this paper, the 'Hannibal Journal',” says his biographer, Mr. Albert B. Paine, “that young Sam Clemens began his writings--burlesques, as a rule, of local characters and conditions--usually published in his brother's absence, generally resulting in trouble on his return. Yet they made the paper sell, and if Orion had but realized his possession he might have turned his brother's talent into capital even then.”