I worked days, and half-days, at anything I could get.

I mowed lawns, trimmed hedges, took up carpets, beat them, and laid them again.

Further, I took the civil service examinations for mail carrier and passed first.

But alas! there was no vacancy, and I must wait.

And while I waited, and in between the odd jobs I managed to procure, I started to earn ten dollars by writing a newspaper account of a voyage I had made, in an open boat down the Yukon, of nineteen hundred miles in nineteen days.