the
hopeful young collegians would go forth to argue with the calm and
unresponsive farmer's wife and sell her something that she had never
needed and had never wanted, until hypnotized by the classic eloquence
of a bright-eyed young man with his foot in the crack of the half-opened
door.

I chose the book game one summer, and went out with about thirty others.
Twenty-five of them quit at the end of the first week. That was about
the usual proportion--but the rest of us stuck. I devastated a swath of
territory fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long. I talked, argued,
persuaded, plead, threatened and mesmerized. I sold books to men on
twine binders, to women with their hands in the bread dough, and once,
after a farmer had come grudgingly out to rescue me from his dog, I sold
a book to him from a tree. I worked two months, tramped four hundred
miles, told the same story of impassioned praise for and confidence in
my book eleven hundred times, and sold sixty-five volumes at a gross
profit of seventy-nine dollars--my expenses being eighty dollars even.
But it was worth the effort. I was a shy young thing at the beginning
of the summer, who believed that strangers would invariably bite when
spoken to. When school began I was a tanned pirate who believed the
world belonged to him who could grab it, and who would have walked up to
a duke and sold him a book on practical farming with as much assurance
as if it were a subpoena I was serving.

Keg went out with the desk crowd, and it was evident from the first
minute that he was going to return a plutocrat. He sold a desk to the
train brakeman on his way to his field, and another to a kind old
gentleman who incautiously got into conversation with him. He raged
through four counties like a plague, selling desks in farmhouses, public
libraries, harness stores, banks and old folks' homes. He was the
season's sensation and won a prize every month from the proud and happy
company. When he had finished collecting he took a hasty run to Denver
on a sight-seeing trip, and came back to Siwash that fall in a parlor
car, with something over four hundred dollars in his jeans.

Naturally we would have ceased worrying about the probability of keeping
Keg with us then if we had not done so long before. As a matter of fact,
he was more prosperous than any of us. He had made his own money and he
drew his own checks when he pleased, instead of taking them the first of
the month wrapped up i