Apparently he meant to be editor as well as proprietor, and Price and I must go, which we made ready to do as soon as the new proprietor came into his own. Three or four times in my life I have suffered some such fate as I suffered then; but I never lost a place except through the misfortune of those who gave it me; then with whatever heart I could I accepted the inevitable. At the worst, I was yet "Consul at Rome now at Columbus," and I had my determination to work. I was never hopeful, I was never courageous, but somehow I was dogged. I had no overweening belief in myself, and yet I thought, at the bottom of my soul, that I had in me the make of the thing I was bent on doing, the thing literature, the greatest thing in the world. When our new proprietor arrived Price and I disabled his superiority, probably on no very sufficient grounds, but he had the advantage in not wanting our help, and I decided to go to Washington and look personally into the facts of the Roman consulship. As perhaps some readers of this may know, it ultimately turned into the Venetian consulship, but by just what friendly magic, has been told with sufficient detail in a chapter of _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_ and need not be rehearsed here. As for Price, he had nothing at all before him, but he was by no means uncheerful. We had certainly had a joyous though parlous year together; our jokes could not have been numbered in a season when the only excuse for joking was that it might as well be that as weeping, though probably we had our serious times, especially when we foreboded a fresh dismay in our chief at some escapade in derision or denunciation of the well-meaning patriots' efforts to hold the Union together with mucilage.