CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY .-- XI.
BY MARK TWAIN.
[Sidenote: (1850.)] [_Dictated March 28th, 1906._] About 1849 or 1850 Orion severed his connection with the printing-house in St.Louis and came up to Hannibal, and bought a weekly paper called the Hannibal "Journal," together with its plant and its good-will, for the sum of five hundred dollars cash.
He borrowed the cash at ten per cent.

interest, from an old farmer named Johnson who lived five miles out of town.

Then he reduced the subscription price of the paper from two dollars to one dollar.

He reduced the rates for advertising in about the same proportion, and thus he created one absolute and unassailable certainty--to wit: that the business would never pay him a single cent of profit.

He took me out of the "Courier" office and engaged my services in his own at three dollars and a half a week, which was an extravagant wage, but Orion was always generous, always liberal with everybody except himself.