independence.

"I followed all the advice I received," he says in his record. "If two
or more persons conflicted with each other, I adopted the views of the
last."

He started full of enthusiasm. He worked like a slave to save help:
wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night. The
others worked too. Orion gave them hard tasks and long hours. He had
the feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all; that all
must labor without stint. In his usual self-accusing way he wrote
afterward:

I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam. He was as swift and as clean as a
good journeyman. I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I
begrudged him the time and made him work more. He set a clean proof, and
Henry a very dirty one. The correcting was left to be done in the form
the day before publication. Once we were kept late, and Sam complained
with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on Henry's dirty
proofs.

Orion did not realize any injustice at the time. The game was too
desperate to be played tenderly. His first editorials were so brilliant
that it was not believed he could have written them. The paper
throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success. But
the pace was too hard to maintain. Overwork brought weariness, and
Orion's enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble. He became
still more exacting.

It is not to be supposed that Sam Clemens had given up all amusements to