ms of
a ten-to-fifty-dollars-a-night lecture tour, such as I had hardly
anticipated, and as I drew nigh unto Tyre I had been thinking whether I
had not better try to get a situation as a farm-hand or dry-goods clerk
before my troubles should have crushed me and driven me to suicide.

But the landlord cheered me. Tyre was a model town. Tyre had a
newspaper, and Tyre patronized literary entertainments. There was a good
hall in Tyre, and the Tyrians had filled it to overflowing last winter
when Chapin spoke there. I went to bed under the benignant influence of
my cheerful host, and dreamed of lecturing to an audience of many
thousands in a hall a trifle larger than the Academy of Music, and with
every nook and corner crowded with enthusiastic listeners, whose joy
culminated with my peroration into such a tumult of delight that they
rushed upon the stage and hoisted me on their shoulders amid cheers so
boisterous that they awoke me. I found I had left my bed and mounted
into a window, with the intention, doubtless, of stepping into the
street and concluding my career at once, lest an anti-climax should be
my fate.

In the morning, I called on the editor of the newspaper.

I desire to recommend my reader to subscribe at once to _The Tyre
Times_, and thus aid to sustain the paper of a gentleman and a scholar,
who was, as editors usually are, a plain-spoken, sensible man, conscious
of the presence of talent in his sanctum, by 'sympathetic attraction.'
The editor of the _Times_ looked into the circumstances of my case with
an experienced and kindly eye, and then said to me,--

'My dear sir, you can not succeed here with a lecture. We have had
several in our village within a few years, but never one which 'paid,'
unless it was one on phrenology, or physiology, or psychology, and
plentifully spiced with humor of the coarsest sort. If you want to make
money in Tyre, you'll take my advice and get a two-headed calf, a
learned pig, or a band of nigger minstrels. Any of these things will
answer your purpose, if you want money; but if you have ambition to
gratify, if you want to lecture for the sake of lecturing, that's a
different thing. At all events, you shall have my good wishes, and I'll
do all I can to get you a house. But it won't pay.'

The reader knows that if I had not been a fool I would have understood
and heeded a statement so plain as this, made by an editor. But then, if
I hadn't been a fool, you know I should never