Again I was at the work which I was always so happy in, and I found myself associated in it on equal terms with a man much nearer my own age than my former associate Reed was. My new fellow-journalist had come to our chief from his own region in northwestern Ohio; I do not know but from his old newspaper there. I cannot write the name of Samuel Price without emotion, so much did I rejoice in our relation to the paper and each other, with its daily incident and bizarre excitement throughout the year we were together. I like to bring his looks before me; his long face with its deep, vertical lines beside the mouth, his black hair and eyes and smoky complexion; his air very grave mostly, but with an eager readiness to break into laughter. It seems to me now that our functions were not very sharply distinguished, though I must have had charge as before of the literary side of the work. We both wrote leading editorials, which our chief supervised and censored for a while and then let go as we wrote them, perhaps finding no great mischief in them. Reed remained the tradition of the office, and if I had formed myself somewhat on his mood and manner, Price now formed himself on mine; and somehow we carried the paper through the year without dishonor or disaster.
It was that year so memorable to me for having five poems published in the _Atlantic Monthly_, two of them in the same number, and I must have been strongly confirmed in my purpose of being a poet. Of course I knew too much of the world, and the literary world, to imagine that I could at once make a living by poetry, but I probably expected to live by some other work until my volumes of poetry should accumulate in sufficient number and sell in sufficient quantity to support me without the aid of prose. As yet I had no expectation of writing fiction; I had not recovered from the all-but-mortal blow dealt my hopes in the failure of that story which I had begun printing in my father's newspaper before I had imagined an ending for it, though I must for several years have been working in stolen moments at another story of village life, which I vainly offered to the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, and after that for many years tried to get some publisher to bring out as a book. The manuscript must still somewhere exist, and I should not be surprised, if I ever found it, to find myself respecting it for a certain helpless reality in its dealing with the conditions I knew best when I began writing it. But it was still to be nearly ten years before I tried anything else of the sort, and even in _Their Wedding Journey_, which was my next attempt, I helped myself out with travel-adventure in carrying forward a slender thread of narrative. Every now and then, however, I wrote some sketch or study, which I printed in our newspaper, where also I printed pieces of verse, too careless or too slight to be hopefully offered for publication in the East.