The Commercial Traveler.
Commercial travelers are the Eden builders of the world; they are the evangels of human happiness; they carry heavens of pure delight in their sample cases.
There are heavens of music in the rustle of their silks, heavens of the beautiful in their laces and lawns, heavens of rapture in their spring bonnets and jewels.
They are the tidal waves of commerce, the rolling billows of progress, the trade winds of civilization. They touch all shores and never cease to blow.
Many a castle builder presses their fragrant havanas to his lips and his dreams turn to curling castles in the air. Many a dreamer sips their mellow wines and lo! a thousand fairies with jeweled wings flutter in his veins and flit among the flowers in the garden of his dreams.
Wherever the commercial travelers swarm there is honey in the gum and the flowers of prosperity are in bloom. They carry the pollen-dust of business on their wings and the honey of wealth in their grips. And whenever they cease to hum about a town it is a sure sign that prosperity is a withered blossom there and that there are weevils in the gum.
The garden spider weaves her web among the honeysuckles and spins as she weaves without distaff or loom. She stretches her radial warp of silvery filaments and then lays on her woof. From the center outward she glides in one continuous spiral, and as she crosses each radius of the warp she touches it deftly with her foot as if to weld the viscid fiber.
And thus her shining net grows until it hangs suspended in the air, half visible, half vanishing, like some phantom wheel of moonbeams.
The commercial travelers are the spiders of enterprise, spinning and weaving without distaff or loom, swinging from town to town, from city to city, from continent to continent; and they are weaving the golden web of commerce around the world, drawing the nations closer together in the warp and woof of universal love and the universal brotherhood of man.