Editorial Wild Oats

Editorial Wild Oats, by Mark
Twain

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Title: Editorial Wild Oats
Author: Mark Twain
Release Date: October 6, 2006 [EBook #19484]
Language: English
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Editorial Wild Oats

BY
Mark Twain
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS
PUBLISHERS--MCMV

Copyright, 1875, 1899, 1903, by SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.
Copyright, 1879, 1899, by SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.
Copyright, 1905, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
All rights reserved.
Published September, 1905.
[Illustration: See p. 57
"I FANCIED HE WAS DISPLEASED"]

Contents
PAGE MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE 3
JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE 11
NICODEMUS DODGE--PRINTER 30
MR. BLOKE'S ITEM 41
HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER 52
THE KILLING OF JULIUS CÆSAR "LOCALIZED" 70

Illustrations
"I FANCIED HE WAS DISPLEASED" Frontispiece
"HE HAD CONCLUDED HE WOULDN'T" Facing p. 4
"GILLESPIE HAD CALLED" " 24
"WHEEZING THE MUSIC OF 'CAMPTOWN RACES'" " 38
"I HAVE READ THIS ABSURD ITEM OVER" " 50
"A LONG CADAVEROUS CREATURE" " 58
"THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE POCKETS" " 82
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber's Note: The dialect in this book is transcribed exactly as|
|in the original. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

Editorial Wild Oats

My First Literary Venture
I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen--an unusually smart child,
I thought at the time. It was then that I did my first newspaper
scribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation in
the community. It did, indeed, and I was very proud of it, too. I was a
printer's "devil," and a progressive and aspiring one. My uncle had me
on his paper (the Weekly Hannibal Journal, two dollars a year, in
advance--five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cord-wood,
cabbages, and unmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer's day he
left town to be gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one

issue of the paper judiciously. Ah! didn't I want to try! Higgins was the
editor on the rival paper. He had lately been jilted, and one night a
friend found an open note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated
that he could no longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear
Creek. The friend ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back
to shore. He had concluded he wouldn't. The village was full of it for
several days, but Higgins did not suspect it. I thought this was a fine
opportunity. I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole
matter, and then illustrated it with villanous cuts engraved on the
bottoms of wooden type with a jack-knife--one of them a picture of
Higgins wading out into the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding
the depth of the water with a walking-stick. I thought it was desperately
funny, and was densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity
about such a publication. Being satisfied with this effort, I looked
around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make
good, interesting matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country
paper with a piece of gratuitous rascality and "see him squirm."
[Illustration: "HE HAD CONCLUDED HE WOULDN'T"]
I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the "Burial of
Sir John Moore"--and a pretty crude parody it was, too.
Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously--not because
they had done anything to deserve it, but merely because I thought it
was my duty to make the paper lively.
Next I gently touched up the newest stranger--the lion of the day, the
gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy. He was a simpering coxcomb
of the first water, and the "loudest" dressed man in the State. He was an
inveterate woman-killer. Every week he wrote lushy "poetry" for the
Journal, about his newest conquest. His rhymes for my week were
headed, "TO MARY IN H--L," meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of
course. But while setting up the piece I was suddenly riven from head
to heel by what I regarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humor, and I
compressed it into a snappy footnote at the bottom--thus:
"We will let this thing pass, just this once; but we wish Mr. J. Gordon

Runnels to understand distinctly that we have a character to sustain,