"You see I lost two years going to school—from seven to nine years old. I was put out of all the private schools for incorrigible “inattention”—then it was discovered that I had been partially deaf and not guilty—but my schooling ended there and I was turned loose on my father’s library to get an education by main force—got it by reading everything—had read Rousseau’s “Confessions” at 14—and books replaced folks as companions. Wanted to get nearer to books and so hired myself to the country printer and newspaper at 13—great disappointment to the family, my mother having dreams of my becoming a preacher—[hell of a preacher I would have made]. I had meantime begun and finished as much as a page apiece of many stories and books, several epic poems—but one day the Old Man went home to dinner and left me only a scrap of “reprint” to set during his hour and a half of absence. It was six or eight lines nonpareil about the Russian gentleman who started to drive from his country home to the city one evening in his sleigh with his 4 children. Wolves attacked them and one by one he threw the children to the pack, hoping each time thus to save the others. When he had thrown the last his sleigh came to the city gate with him sitting in it a raving maniac. That yarn had been going the rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing the awful details as I set the type and made it a thriller. The Old Man never “held copy” reading proof, so he passed it all right and I saw myself an author in print for the first time. The smell of printer’s ink has never since been out of my hair."