"What a shame!" said I. "What are you usually paid?" "Why, sir," he answered, "I used to work on a royalty basis, but it was so difficult to keep the accounts when millions and millions of people used the phrase and when it was printed in all sorts of pamphlets, that I changed my contracts and sold out and out. But now," he added sadly, "I cannot sell a thing. It is a terrible thing the way in which a change of custom takes the bread out of an old man's mouth." I said it was, indeed. "And yet," he continued eagerly, "it is an older trade than you think for. Believe me, sir, it has been in our family for generations." I was astonished to hear this, for I believed tags to be quite modern, but he assured me it was not so. "My own great-grandfather," he said, "was the author of 'No taxation without representation,' and that was a stunner. It rhymed and it took root, two things that often go together, and the old man on his death bed told my father, who has told me, how it was done, but you will excuse me if I do not tell you that because it is a secret of the trade; it used to be my livelihood and that livelihood may creep up again." He said these last words rather doubtfully, and was interrupted by a dreadful cough.
I asked him whether he used a rhyming dictionary, like Wordsworth, the great poet. He said, between the intervals of his coughing, "No, sir, no! I find it cramps the style! I ascribe a great deal of Wordsworth's failures to this deleterious habit. I walk the streets, keeping my mind as vacant as possible and then the things occur to me—or rather they did once occur to me," he added sadly. Then he sighed and said, "There is no market any more."
This was years ago. I have hoped against hope that the trick would return, but time has gone by and apparently the market for such things is dead and, as I said before, I think the old man is dead, too. But what a lot of good he did in his time, and how true it is of him, as of many other lesser men, that they achieved far more than they knew, and that their reward was not proportionate to their achievement.
ON "AND"
Dark eyes adventure bring: the blue, serene,
Do promise Paradise—and yours are green.
This little jewel—called "The Lover's Complaint"—is ascribed by some to Herrick. They are wrong. It proceeds from a younger but already faltering pen.
I introduce it only at the head of this to illustrate the singular depth, the weight, the value of the word "and." Even in the English tongue, the noblest vehicle of expression (but in this point weak), the word "and" plays its subtle parts.