There is a land, where every pulse is thrilling,
With rapture, earth's sojourners may not know,
Where heaven's repose the weary heart is stilling,
And peacefully earth's storm-tossed currents flow.
Far out of sight, while yet the flesh enfolds us,
Lies that fair country, where our hearts abide,
And, of its bliss, naught more wondrous is told us,
Than these few words, I shall be satisfied.
CHAPTER XII.
FROM PHILISTINE TO BENEDICT AND A HONEYMOON.
The fates, who lead the willing-and drive the unwilling, guided me to the old time firm of B. & T. publishers. They were overwhelmed with applications from the great army of the impecunious, and did not wish to pay any more salaries; but "mercy tempers the blast to the shorn lamb," and they persuaded me, by a tender of large profits on their Worcester's Dictionaries, to strike out on my own hook and endeavor to induce a reluctant public to buy these instead of the popular dictionaries written by "Noah Webster who came over in the ark."
The special prices granted by the publishers enabled me to undersell the wholesalers, and by securing their adoption as regular text-books by school boards, I made more money than ever before in my life, sometimes from $25 to $100 per day, consequently the firm finding I was filling the markets and my own pockets so that they had no sales at regular prices, hired me at a liberal salary as representative of all their publications.
In this business I won my "double stars," although the competition was intense. I often found as many as twenty agents at the same time and in the same town, log-rolling with school committees for the adoption of their books, the merits of the publications "cut but little ice." Nearly every school official "had his price," wanting to know what there was in his vote for him, and the agent who best concealed the bribery hook by dining and wining teachers and committeemen, filling their libraries with complimentary books and their pockets with secret commissions, "caught the most fish."
When among Romans, I was, much to my disgust, obliged to do as Romans did. I would often go to cities where my opponent's readers or arithmetics had been adopted the night before, point out the defects of rival publications, give an unabridged dictionary to each official, offer a ten per cent. commission to the "king pin," take the board in a hack to their headquarters, secure a reconsideration, telegraph for my books, and the next day with express wagons and helpers, put our readers into every school in the town.
This was sharp practice, prices were cut, until finally, we gave new books in even exchange for old ones, trusting to future sales to reimburse us, but when they needed another supply, they would swap even with another publisher, so that our bread cast upon the waters never returned.
We often secured "louder calls" for influential teachers and clergymen in reciprocation for their votes, bought anything they had to sell at their own prices until many publishers became bankrupt; the big fish swallowing the little ones, and then came the survival of the longest purse.