I came to the emphatic conclusion that I was 'hard up.'
I kept bachelor's hall in Franklin Street, in apartments not altogether sumptuous, yet sufficiently so for my purposes,—to wit, to sit in and to sleep in; and inasmuch as I took my meals amid the gilded splendors of the big saloon on the corner of Broadway, I was not disposed to reproach myself with squalor. Yet the articles of furniture in my room were so far removed, separately or in the aggregate, from anything like the superfluous, that when I calmly deliberated what to part with, there was nothing which struck me as a luxury or a comfort as distinct from a necessary of life. I took a second mental inventory: two common chairs, a table, a mirror, a rocking-chair, a bed, a lounge, and a single picture on the wall.
I declare, thought I, here's nothing to spare.
But things were getting to a crisis. I must 'make a raise,' somehow. Borrow? Ah, certainly—where was the benevolent moneyed individual? My credit had gone with my cash; both were sunk in the washing-machines.
I lighted my pipe, and surveyed my household goods once more.
There was the picture: couldn't I do without that?
Possibly. But that picture I had had—let me see—fifteen, yes, sixteen years. That picture was a third prize for excellence in declamation, presented me at the school exhibition in —— Street, when I was twelve years old. That was in 1843, and here, on the first of December, 1859, I sat deliberately meditating its sale for paltry bread and butter!
No, no; I'd go hungry a little longer, before I'd part with that old relic—remembrancer of the proudest day of my life. What a pity I hadn't permitted that day to give a direction to my life, instead of turning my attention to the paltry expedients for money-making followed by the common herd! I might have been an accomplished orator by this time, capable of drawing crowds and pocketing a thousand a month, or so. But my tastes had run in other channels since the day when I took that prize.
Still, when I thought of it deliberately, I made bold to believe there was that yet in me which could meet the expectant eyes of audiences nor quail before them.