for
each of these subscribers."

"Mr. R---- says the paper is not worth reading. That he wouldn't pay a
shilling a year for it. I advise you to stop it. He never pays for any
thing if he can help it. Mr. S---- paid. Mr. T---- paid up to this
date, and wishes it stopped. Never ordered it. Mr. U---- paid. I called
upon a great many more, but they put me off with one excuse or other. I
never had a much worse lot of bills."

A basin of cold water on a sentimental serenader could not have
produced a greater revulsion of feeling than did this unlooked-for
return of my collector. Nineteen dollars and fifty cents, instead of
about two hundred dollars, were all he had been able to gather up;
there was no promise of success in the future on any different scale. I
received the money, less ten per cent. for collecting, and was left
alone to my own reflections. Not of the most pleasant kind, the reader
may well imagine. For an hour I brooded over the strangely embarrassing
position in which I found myself, and then, after thinking until my
head was hot and my feet and hands cold, I determined to reduce,
immediately, the edition of my paper from three thousand to one
thousand, and thus save an item of thirty dollars a week in paper and
press-work. To send off my clerk, also, to whom I was paying seven
dollars weekly, and with the aid of a boy, attend to the office, and do
the writing and mailing myself. I then went over the subscription-book,
and counted up the names. The number was just seven hundred and twenty.
I had but a little while before replied to a question on the subject,
that I had about twelve hundred on my list. And I did vaguely imagine
that I had that number. I knew better now.

To describe minutely the trials, sufferings, and disappointments of the
whole year, would take too much time and space. The subsequent returns
of my collector were about on a par with the first. Finding it
impossible to pay the printer and paper maker, as promised, out of the
advance subscriptions falling due at the end of three months, I
borrowed from some of my friends about four hundred dollars, and paid
it over, stating, when I did so, that I must have a new contract, based
upon a six months' credit.

I found no great difficulty in obtaining this from the paper maker, to
whom I spoke in confident terms of my certain ultimate success. The
printer required half cash, which I agreed to pay.

This arrangement I fondly hoped would give me