Mr. Lawrence remained in San Francisco but a few months after my advent on the _Era_. While he stayed he did all in his power to give me, socially and otherwise, a good “send off.” He introduced me to aspiring and successful people, placed me in good material surroundings and opened for me the door to a successful element. That was all he could do, and in my estimation about all one person can do to really advance the fortunes of another. But when he left I descended, hired the cheapest lodgings, lived on the cheese-paring plan, and was thereby brought mainly into contact with that cheap element in human nature which longs for the best things in the world, is willing even in some way to beg for them, looks on the prosperous with envy and aversion and expends most of its force in anxiety or grumbling, instead of devising ways and means to push forward. So for the most part I did. I accepted the lowest remuneration for my services, deeming it the inevitable, went figuratively hat in hand to those who bought my articles, and brought my mind at last to think they had done me a great favor on paying me my just dues. I was always expecting starvation or failure of some sort and for that very reason got a near approach to it. My cheap lodgings brought me a sneak thief who stole the first decent suit of clothes I had worn for years in less than forty-eight hours after I had put them on. My associations brought me people who were always moaning over their luck, living mentally in the poorhouse, and therefore we mutually strengthened and supported each other on the road to what was little better than the poorhouse. Like them, I never thought of being else than a worker for wages, and ran away mentally at any idea of taking responsibilities. Like them I regarded the class who did, as living in a world I never could reach. Like them I regarded the only sure and safe haven was a “job,” or situation at steady, regular wages. So, for years I had indifferent luck, and lived a good deal on the threadbare side of life. The cause and the fault lay entirely in myself. Industriously, though unconsciously I sat down on myself, punched myself into corners; as I in mind accepted the bottom of the heap as the inevitable I stayed near the bottom. If I should live that and previous portions of my life over again, I should probably do the same thing. Because I believe there is a truth in predestination. In other words, when you are in a certain mental condition your physical life and fortune will be an exact correspondence or material reflection of that condition. When you grow out of that condition and get a different mind your surroundings, fortunes, and associations will be in accordance with that state of mind. Thank Heaven, we can grow. But the I that existed twenty-five years ago was predestined to meet the fortunes it did twenty-five years ago, and those fortunes could only change as the mind of that “I” changed. CHAPTER XXXIII. EDITING VS. WRITING.