“Nothing? Don’t you know anything now about the habits of birds and beasts and fishes?” “Oh, yes! I could tell you a heap about that.” “Could you? Very well; I’ll give you a trial. I take you on Straw’s recommendation. His opinion, I tell you, I value more than a score of written characters in a case like this. You’ve to make yourself useful in fifty different ways.” I assented, with a light heart, and he took me at my word and the further bargain was completed. My wages were small at first, of course; but, with what I had in hand, they would keep me going no doubt till I could prove myself worth more to my employer. In this manner I became one of Ripley’s hands and later on myself a pamphleteer in a small way. I wrote to my father that evening and briefly acquainted him of my good fortune. For some months my work was of a heterogeneous description. Ripley was legitimately a job printer, on rather a large scale, and a bookbinder. To these, however, he added a little venturesomeness in publishing on his own account, as also a considerable itch for scribbling. Becoming at a hint a virulent partisan in any extremist cause whatsoever, it will be no matter for wonder that his private room was much the resort of levelers, progressives and abolitionists of every creed and complexion. There furious malcontents against systems they were the first to profit by met to talk and never to listen. There fanatical propagandists, eager to fly on the rudimentary wing stumps of first principles, fluttered into print and came flapping to the ground at the third line. There, I verily believe, plots were laid that would presently have leveled powers and potentates to the ground at a nod, had any of the conspirators ever possessed the patience to sit on them till hatched. This, however, they never did. All their fiery periphrastics smoked off into the soot of print and in due course lumbered the office with piles of unmarketable drivel.