Evening star., 1908-01-19


E9$RAGM gether with its plant and its good
SW%MA\Sn WILL for the of five hundred
fSI1GS12SM dollars cash. He borrowed the cash
IL NSSRNLk11 at ten per cent interest from an
KAG0EAS old farmer named Johnson who
lived five miles out of town. Then
he reduced the subscription price Of the paper from
two dollars to dollar. He reduced the rates for
advertising in about the proportion, and thus
he created one absolute and unassailabe certainty
to wit: that the business would never pay him
single cent of profit. He took me out of The
Courier Office and engaged my services in his
at three dollars and half week, which was
travagant wage; but Orion was always generous, al
ways liberal with everybody except himself. 1t cost
him nothing in my for he never able to pay
penny as long as | was with him
BY the end of the first year he found he must make
some economies. The office rent was cheap; but it
not cheap enough He could not afford to pay
rent of any kind, SO he moved the whole plant into
the house we lived in and it cramped the dwelling
place cruelty. He kept that paper alive during four
years but have at this time no idea how he ac
complished it. Toward the end of each year he had
to turn out and Scrape and scratch for the fifty
dollars of interest due Mr. Johnson and that fifty
dollars about the only cash he ever received or
paid out, suppose. while he was proprietor of that
newspaper, except for ink and printing paper. The
paper was dead failure. 1t had to be that from
the start.
Finally he handed it over to Mr.. Johnson and
went up to Muscatine. Iowa, and acquired small
interest in weekly newspaper there 1t not
sort of property to marry on-but no matter. He
came across s winning and pretty girl who lived in
Quincy, Illinois. a few miles below Keokuk, and
they became engaged. He always falling in love
with girls but by some accident or other he had never
gone SO far engagement before. And now he
achieved nothing but misfortune by it, because he
straghtway fell in love with Keokuk girl. He
married the Keokuk girl and they began a struggle
for life which turned out to be difficult enterprise
and very unpromsing.
To gain living in Muscatine plainly impos
sible SO Orion and his wife went to Keokuk to
live. for she wanted to be near her relatives. He
bought little bit of job printing pant-on credit
of course, and at once put prices down to where
not the apprentices could get living out of it.
And this sort of thing went
7 HAD not joined the Muscatine migration Just
before that happened (which think was in 1881
disappeared one night and fled to St. Louis. There
| worked in the composing room of The Evening
News" for time, and then started on my travels
to the world. The world was New York city, and
there little Worlds Fair there 1t had just
been opened where the great reservoir afterward
being bult-Fifth-ave. and 42d-st. | arrived in
New York with two three dollars in pocket change
and ten-doar bank bill concealed in the lining OF
my coat | got work at vlainous wages in the
establishment of John A. Gray and Green Cliffs
and found board in sufficiently villanous mechan
les boarding house on Duane-st. The firm paid my
wages IN wildcat money at its face value and my
weeks wage merely sutfced to pay board and
lodging By and BY | went to Philadelphia, and
worked there some months as a sub on The
Inquirer and The Public Ledger" Finally
made flying trip to Washington to see the sights
there, and in 1884 l went back to the Mississippi
Valley. sitting upright in the smoking two
was exhausted. went to bed on board steamboat
that was bound for Muscatine | fell asleep once
with my clothes on, and didn't wake again for
thirty-sx hours.
| worked in that little job office in Keokuk as
much as two years, should say, without col
ecting cent Of wages; for Orion never able to
pay anything; but Dick Hgham anC l had good
times. l don't know what Dick got; but it was
probably only uncashable promises
One day in the midwinter of 1886 or 1871
think it was 1861 coming along the main