His friends were devoted to him.

He had that quality, which we vaguely term magnetic, the quality of attaching others to us, and maintaining over them the ascendency of our character and ideas.
In the midst of all this progress along so many lines, the days of his apprenticeship in the _Herald_ office came to an end.

He was just twenty.

With true Yankee enterprise and pluck, he proceeded to do for himself what for seven years he had helped to do for another--publish a newspaper.

And with a brave heart the boy makes his launch on the uncertain sea of local journalism and becomes editor and publisher of a real, wide-awake sheet, which he calls the _Free Press._ The paper was independent in politics and proved worthy of its name during the six months that Garrison sat in the managerial chair.