“I got so nervous about this time that I moved into another room. I was afraid if I went on going out with him the police might manage to stay awake long enough to pinch us. The last time I saw him he told me they had made some bed springs out of this steel by mistake and some of them were sent out and used. He heard of a man who had a cot in his summer tent. He came in one afternoon very tired and threw himself on the cot and the next thing he knew he flew through the top of the tent fell back and broke through and landed on the floor with an awful jolt. He told me he was sure that steel would be a money maker as soon as he learned how to control it.”
All the Way from Melbourne
A college teacher learns much about far away places if he cares to do so. This knowledge is also very intimate and very accurate. It is the kind of knowledge that cannot be drawn from books of travel or from encyclopedias. It is first-hand information given by people who have lived there. It is obtained from his students. Most of those he is called upon to teach come, probably, from within a radius of fifty or a hundred miles. There is always a sprinkling, however, of boys from far off places.
Rochambeau College always has a few such. I can remember among them several from Japan, from China, India, South America, and one from Siam. We sometimes hear from these boys after they have returned to their homes and once in a great while we are rich enough to visit them. What a fuss they make when we do and how glad they seem to be to see us. I have been something of a traveler in a small way and everywhere I have gone, and been able to turn aside to visit the boys, I have met the most cordial welcome. This is one of the rewards that come to the teacher who has tried to do his best. Sometimes he comes in contact with people from distant lands in strange ways; and it is about one of these strange happenings that I am about to tell.
After I had been teaching for several years I married Sally Lunn, the daughter of a local baker. We had two sons and a daughter to bless our union. I noticed as the years passed that my surplus cash was waning rather than waxing. This led me to make a careful review of the situation. My salary was scarcely opulent and was not mounting with great rapidity. It was evident that if Providence saw fit to endow us with a continued shower of childish blessings I must either find more income or breakfast, lunch and dine on corn mush—and I was not fond of mush.
Among my early investments had been the purchase of a printing press. The outfit was a small one but it was complete and such as enabled me to make a beginning as a printer in a small way. As I practised the art I became constantly more skilful and could now print a very fair job. This seemed to furnish an opening and I went to work. The venture was moderately successful and led to a decided, though moderate, increase in my income. Presently I was able to buy a larger press and more type and to rent a room in the town in which to install it. Here I employed a competent foreman and began my commercial career.
I had written a text book for my pupils in the meantime and this I printed and published. Then I started a journal in which my book was advertised, leading to orders from abroad and the influx of manuscripts from my friends. In a few years I had a prosperous business on my hands and all my spare time was usefully employed. It soon became necessary to arrange for agents for the sale of my publications abroad. This was easily arranged in London and Tokio but more difficult in other places. I wrote to Secretary of Commerce Hoover for the name of an agent in Melbourne and he sent me the names of about fifty firms, dealers in books in that place. I immediately aimed at the flock and fired four letters at random, but brought down no birds. Weeks and months passed on without a response.
I am a late riser by preference and an early one only under compulsion. I was finishing my breakfast at a moderate rate one morning when word came that a gentleman had called and was waiting for me. My visitor was a middle aged man, plainly dressed in tweed with a cloth cap. He informed me that he was traveling for pleasure and had undertaken to go from New York to San Francisco by auto. He had stopped for the night at our local hotel and in descending a dark stairway had fallen and broken his arm. He was admitted to the hospital, permitted the setting of the arm and submitted to the necessary delay—for it was impossible to drive with one arm. He found himself doomed to inaction, for his daily occupation was confined to a visit to the hospital to have his arm dressed, and time hung heavy on his hands. In this dilemma he inquired of Dr. Kuhlmann, his attendant and one of my old students, whether there was not some one else in the place with a taste for science. Dr. Kuhlmann had referred him to me.