him earlier as an advantage taken of his youthful inexperience. He rebelled
against the memory of that tutelage, in spite of which he had accomplished
such great things. If he had not squandered his time or fallen into vicious
courses in circumstances of so much discouragement, if he had come out of
it all self-reliant and independent, he knew whom he had to thank for it.
The worst of the matter was that there was some truth in all this.

The ardor of his satisfaction cooled in the two years following his
graduation, when in intervals of teaching country schools he was actually
reduced to work at his trade on a village newspaper. But it was as a
practical printer, through the freemasonry of the craft, that Bartley heard
of the wish of the Equity committee to place the Free Press in new hands,
and he had to be grateful to his trade for a primary consideration from
them which his collegiate honors would not have won him. There had not
yet begun to be that talk of journalism as a profession which has since
prevailed with our collegians, and if Bartley had thought, as other
collegians think, of devoting himself to newspaper life, he would have
turned his face toward the city where its prizes are won,--the ten and
fifteen dollar reporterships for which a font years' course of the classics
is not too costly a preparation. But, to tell the truth, he had never
regarded his newspaper as anything but a make-shift, by which he was to be
carried over a difficult and anxious period of his life, and enabled to
attempt something worthier his powers. He had no illusions concerning it;
if he had ever thought of journalism as a grand and ennobling profession,
these ideas had perished, in his experience in a village printing-office.
He came to his work in Equity with practical and immediate purposes which
pleased the committee better. The paper had been established some time
before, in one of those flurries of ambition which from time to time seized
Equity, when its citizens reflected that it was the central town in the
county, and yet not the shire-town. The question of the removal of the