poor; the rich were already supplied with
dictionaries; and the schools would have no funds available with which
to buy reference books for nearly a year. Competing agents had visited
every house before my arrival on the coast, and I therefore resigned
my worthless position, and took the Eastern agency for a Tonic Port
which had, by its wonderful efficacy, delivered many from the horrors
of nervous prostration, anaemia, and kindred diseases which afflict so
many of the human race.

Another disenchantment,--another Eden becomes a Sahara. I had reached
the Pacific coast just when the departing rainy season had left all
nature fair as a poet's dream of love, and, vainly dreaming that this
was perpetual, it seemed as if I would sigh for no other heaven. But
the scorching heat and Siroccoes from the Mohave Desert followed close
upon the rear-guard of the retreating, life-giving rain-clouds, and
soon the lovely flowers died; the enchanting green grass withered; the
soul of the beautiful vanished, and the suffocating dust storms buried
the earth in a ghostly shroud, save where wealth was sufficient to
bring the mountain streams for irrigation.

I had for a time reveled in the dreams which fleetingly haunt all
mortals, that there I had found the lost Arcadia, where balmy zephyrs
fan the brow into ecstasy forever; but, alas! After a brief respite
I had, in that land which the real estate sharks called "Paradise,"
suffered more from alternating chilling winds and withering heat than
ever before; one day sweltering in the thinnest of seersuckers, and
perhaps the very next shivering in all the woolens I could command.

Without a shadow of regret or even a backward look, I bade farewell to
the Pacific and returned to the Atlantic of my youth, until the day
dawns and the shadows flee away.

I sojourned for some months in the cities of Richmond, Baltimore,
Providence, and Philadelphia, endeavoring to impress upon the minds of
the physicians the importance of prescribing my remedy, but with no
glittering financial success, lingering for weeks in the last named
city, on the very verge of the grave to which I was brought by the
filthy water of that grotesquely misnamed "City of Brotherly Love."

I had been, in former years, the champion school-book agent of New
England, and publishers had often told me that if I ever returned to
this vocation, they would gladly employ me. I applied to one of these
for a position, requesting a man w