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.