Getting a Wrong Start Author:Emerson Hough Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m Fbom Phxab To Post—The Man Who Couid Do "almost Anything" When I left the little mining camp which had known my dismal failure in making a start in the p... more »rofession of law, I received, as I have said, from my associates there only the sneering contempt which is accorded the renegade; for they accounted as renegade any man who, having come West to make a start, had quit the West and gone back home to "the States." On the other hand, as I learned when I arrived once more at my native village in the States, those who had remained behind there felt toward the man who came back from the West after a failure to make good there, quite as the West had which he had abandoned. Hence I had friends neither in the Southwest nor in my old home. The fact began to leak out that I was not getting a start; and all my family's friends were, of course, glad of that. For me to open a law office in the home town would now have been practically impossible. I now had left almost no money at all, and I needed work of some sort. Affairs were very bad with my family at this time. My father had only a fragment of his business left, and was settling down now to be a broken, silent, and disappointed man; although I never knew him to be soured and never knew him to complain. One sister had died far from home, another was getting on very badly, on account of an unhappy marriage. When she needed some money, my father mortgaged the old home and gave it to her. I know, because I paid off that mortgage myself later on. But for the present I did not know which way to turn. I had never traveled very much and knew little of the different sections of the western country, although at that time it was customary for young men to go West to make their own start in life. The immediate and pressing thing for me to...« less