“As Thou has made Thy world without, Make Thou more fair my world within,' et cetery.”
“Whittier, J. G., commonly called the poet of liberty, born 1807, died 1892'—with a complete sketch of his life, a list of his most popular pieces, and a history of his work on behalf of the slave.
“I was much comforted by this,” said Eliph' Hewlitt, “and I run over the pages this way, thinking of what I had read, when I hit on page 927: 'Geography of Land and Sea.' I skipped ten pages telling in an interesting manner of the five great continents, their political division, mountains, lakes, and plains, their vegetable inhabitants and animals, their ancient and modern history, et cetery, and I come to 'Islands, Common, Volcanic, and Coral'; and on page 940 I read that coral islands are often surrounded by a reef on which the waves dash, but that there is usually a quiet lagoon between the reef and the island, with somewhere an opening from the sea into the lagoon.
“When I read that,” said Eliph', closing the book, “I shut up my book and swum round until I come to the opening, which was there, just like the book said it would be, and I swum across the lagoon, and fell exhausted on the beach. I was played out, and I had swallered too much water. I would have died right there, but I thought of my book, and I turned to the index, where every subject known to the vast realm of knowledge is set down alphabetically, from 'A' to 'Z', twenty thousand references in all, dealing with every subject from the time of Adam to the present day, including, in the new and revised edition just from the press, a history of the war with Spain, with full page portraits of Dewey, Sampson, Cervera, and the boy king, and colored plates of the battles of Manila Bay and Santiago. I run my eye down the page till I came to 'Drowned, How to Revive the,' page 96; and what I read there saved my life.”
The ladies sighed with relief.
“What shall I say about my four long years on that island?” said Eliph'. “I was the only man on it. Oh, the pangs of solitude! Oh, the terrors of being alone! But, ladies and gents, I suffered none of them. I was not alone. He is never alone who has a copy of Jarby's 'Encyclopedia of Knowledge and Compendium of Literature, Science and Art,' published by Jarby & Goss, New York, and sold for the trifling sum of five dollars a volume, one dollar down and one dollar a month until paid, the book delivered when the first payment is made. And that, my friends, was the book I had, and the book you see before you.”
The minister put out his hand.
“May I look at the volume?” he asked, and Eliph' passed it to him with a nod.
“From the first the book was my friend, philosopher, and guide. I had no matches. Page 416, 'Fire, Its Traditions—How to Make a Fire Without Matches—Fire-fighting, Fire-extinguishers,' et cetery, taught me to make a fire by rubbing two sticks, as the savages do. I had no weapons to kill the fowls of the air. Page 425, 'Weapons, Ancient and Modern—Their History—How to Make and Use Them,' et cetery, told me how to twist the cocoanut bark into a cord, and to shape the limb of the gum-gum tree into a bow and arrow. Page 396, 'Birds, Tropical, Temperate, and Arctic—Song Birds, Edible Birds, and Birds of Plumage,' et cetery, with their Latin and common names, and over one thousand illustrations, told me which to kill, and which to eat. Page 100, 'The Complete Kitchen Guide,' being eight hundred tested recipes—roasts, fries, pastry, cakes, bread, puddings, entrées, soups, how to make candy, how to clean brass, copper, silver, tin, et cetery—told me how to prepare and cook them.
“Yes, my friends, I went to that island an ignorant, unbelieving man, and I came away educated and reformed. For my idle hours there was the 'Complete Mathematician,' showing how to figger the most difficult problems easily, how to measure corn in the drib, water in the well, figger interest, et cetery, by which I become posted on all kinds of arithmetic. There was the 'Complete Letter Writer, or a Guide to Polite and Correct Correspondence,' the 'Dictionary of Legal Terms, or Every Man His Own Lawyer,' the 'Modern Penman,' the 'Eureka Shorthand System'—in fact, all the knowledge in the world, condensed into one thousand and four pages, for the small sum of five dollars. Who can afford to be without this book, which will pay for itself twice over every week of the year?