ponded with
magazine editors without paying the return postage and therefore I am
not in shape to put in the soft touches where they belong, and I am also
aware that the field is too big for me, for it includes the heart of a
woman, a domain in which I am easily lost, although I did set up to be a
pilot for my friend.

As for my own matrimonial prospects, they were dim. I really cared
nothing about them, for I understood I was such a small potato I
wouldn't be noticed for seed, and there seemed poor prospects for me to
ever sprout into anything that would attract attention enough to draw a
handful of paris green and plaster. I had a better opinion of my ideas
on saving the country, however. I found a lot of people who agreed with
me that the country was going to the bad; that there wasn't much use
trying to get money enough ahead to go into business, because if you did
you would only net fresh air and exercise and an appetite that would cut
whale oil and consume the margin.

Jim found it an easy matter to turn me from prying into his private
affairs. I had just been reading my paper. "Shall Autocrats Rule Us?"
was the subject of the editor's heavy work for the evening and it
stirred me up. That fellow used "strong and powerful" language, as our
dominie used to say when he was preaching and got two feet away from his
notes on the pulpit and doubled on his tracks.

"You can put it down in your notebook, Jim, that I say the country is in
a bad fix."

"That's right, Ben, and unless you get the job of mending it, no George
Washington will appear."

"Listen to this," said I, paying no attention to his guying.
"'Everywhere the voice is that of Democracy, but the hand and the
checkbook are those of a respectable Autocracy.' Isn't that so? Why,
when I had ploughed through a stack of those magazines" (and I pointed
to our parlor table and its load of ten-cent literature) "I burned two
fillings of the lamp, and I tell you I had to swallow hard on a lot of
big words that would have kept old Webster chasing to the fellows he
stole from; I wound in and out a lot of trotting sentences that broke
twice to the line on a track that was laid out by a park gardener to go
as far as possible without reaching anywhere, and I fetched up this
morning with a swelled head, stuffed full of cold-microbes that had
formed a combine from the nozzle of my Adam's apple clean up to a mass
of chronic gooseflesh that had crusted on the top of my crow