th some
severity that my characters were too rough to be presentable in a paper
so refined as ours. I confess they did seem somewhat too robust for a
sheet so anaemic as _Hearth and Home_ had been in the months just
preceding. But when, the very next week after this protest was made, the
circulation of the paper increased some thousands at a bound, my
employer's critical estimate of the work underwent a rapid change--a
change based on what seemed to him better than merely literary
considerations. By the time the story closed, at the end of fourteen
instalments, the subscription list had multiplied itself four or five
fold. It is only fair to admit, however, that the original multiplicand
had been rather small.

Papers in Canada and in some of the other English colonies transferred
the novel bodily to their columns, and many of the American country
papers helped themselves to it quite freely. It had run some weeks of
its course before it occurred to any one that it might profitably be
reprinted in book form. The publishers were loath to risk much in the
venture. The newspaper type was rejustified to make a book page, and
barely two thousand copies were printed for a first edition. I remember
expressing the opinion that the number was too large.

"The Hoosier School-Master" was pirated with the utmost promptitude by
the Messrs. Routledge, in England, for that was in the barbarous days
before international copyright, when English publishers complained of
the unscrupulousness of American reprinters, while they themselves
pounced upon every line of American production that promised some
shillings of profit. "The Hoosier School-Master" was brought out in
England in a cheap, sensational form. The edition of ten thousand has
long been out of print. For this large edition and for the editions
issued in the British colonies and in continental Europe I have never
received a penny. A great many men have made money out of the book, but
my own returns have been comparatively small. For its use in serial form
I received nothing beyond my salary as editor. On the copyright edition
I have received the moderate royalty allowed to young authors at the
outset of their work. The sale of the American edition in the first
twenty years amounted to seventy thousand copies. The peculiarity of
this sale is its steadiness. After twenty years, "The Hoosier
School-Master" is selling at the average rate of more than three
thousand copies per annum.