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
not 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 villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wooden
type with a jackknife--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."
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.
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