Nobody cares now for the details, or even the main incidents of state legislation, but in that day people seemed to care so much that the newspapers at the capital found their account in following them, and as I learned later the papers at Cincinnati and Cleveland had correspondents at Columbus to let them know by letter what went on in the House and Senate. My father could make a very full and faithful report of the legislative proceedings in longhand, and for this he was paid ten dollars a week. As I have told elsewhere, I worked on the same paper and had four dollars as compositor; my eldest brother became very provisionally clerk in a grocery-store where he had three dollars, and read the novels of Captain Maryatt in the intervals of custom. Our joint income enabled us to live comfortably in the little brick house, on a humble new street, which my father hired for ten dollars a month from a Welsh carpenter with a large family. No sense of our own Welsh origin could render this family interesting; I memorized some scraps of their Cymric as I overheard it across the fence, but we American children did not make acquaintance with the small Welsh folk, or with more than these few words of their language, which after several attempts at its grammar still remain my sole knowledge of it. On the other side lived a mild, dull German of some lowly employ, whom I remember for his asking us across the fence, one day, to lend him a leather cover. When by his patient repetition this construed itself as an envelope, we loved him for the pleasure it gave us, and at once made leather-cover the family name for envelope. Across the street dwelt an English family of such amiable intelligence that they admired some verses of mine which my father stole to their notice and which they put me to shame by praising before my face.