I had found a letter in the post office as I came home from the hill side, and finally I opened it.

Eureka! [I never did know what Eureka meant, but it seems to be as proper a word to heave in as any when no other that sounds pretty offers.] It was a deliberate offer to me of Twenty-Five Dollars a week to come up to Virginia and be city editor of the Enterprise.
I would have challenged the publisher in the "blind lead" days--I wanted to fall down and worship him, now.

Twenty-Five Dollars a week--it looked like bloated luxury--a fortune a sinful and lavish waste of money.
But my transports cooled when I thought of my inexperience and consequent unfitness for the position--and straightway, on top of this, my long array of failures rose up before me.

Yet if I refused this place I must presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a humiliation since he was thirteen years old.

Not much to be proud of, since it is so common--but then it was all I had to be proud of.