discussion of public questions. It was as if an innate force was
directing him toward his mission--the reformation of great public
wrongs. At sixteen he made his first contribution to the press. It was a
discussion of a quasi-social subject, the relation of the sexes in
society. He was at the impressionable age, when the rosy god of love is
at his tricks. He was also at a stage of development, when boys are
least attractive, when they are disagreeably virile, full of their own
importance and the superiority of their sex. In the "Breach of the
Marriage Promise," by "An Old Bachelor," these signs of adolescence are
by no means wanting, they are, on the contrary, distinctly present and
palpable. But there were other signs besides these, signs that the youth
had had his eyes wide open to certain difficulties which beset the
matrimonial state and to the conventional steps which lead to it, and
that he had thought quite soberly, if not altogether wisely upon them.
The writer was verdant, to be sure, and self-conscious, and partial in
his view of the relations of the sexes, but there was withal a serious
purpose in the writing. He meant to expose and correct what he conceived
to be reprehensible conduct on the part of the gentler sex, bad feminine
manners. Just now he sees the man's side of the shield, a few years
later he will see the woman's side also. He ungallantly concludes "to
lead the '_single life_,' and not," as he puts it, "trouble myself about
the ladies." A most sapient conclusion, considering that this veteran
misogynist was but sixteen years old. During the year following the
publication of this article, he plied his pen with no little
industry--producing in all fifteen articles on a variety of topics, such
as "South American Affairs," "State Politics," "A Glance at Europe,"
etc., all of which are interesting now chiefly as showing the range of
his growing intelligence, and as the earliest steps by which he acquired
his later mastery of the pen and powerful style of composition. In a
letter addressed to his mother about this time, the boy is full of