In the morning, I called on the editor of the newspaper.

I desire to recommend my reader to subscribe at once to The Tyre Times, and thus aid to sustain the paper of a gentleman and a scholar, who was, as editors usually are, a plain-spoken, sensible man, conscious of the presence of talent in his sanctum, by ‘sympathetic attraction.’  The editor of the Times looked into the circumstances of my case with an experienced and kindly eye, and then said to me,—­

’My dear sir, you can not succeed here with a lecture.  We have had several in our village within a few years, but never one which ‘paid,’ unless it was one on phrenology, or physiology, or psychology, and plentifully spiced with humor of the coarsest sort.  If you want to make money in Tyre, you’ll take my advice and get a two-headed calf, a learned pig, or a band of nigger minstrels.  Any of these things will answer your purpose, if you want money; but if you have ambition to gratify, if you want to lecture for the sake of lecturing, that’s a different thing.  At all events, you shall have my good wishes, and I’ll do all I can to get you a house.  But it won’t pay.’

The reader knows that if I had not been a fool I would have understood and heeded a statement so plain as this, made by an editor.  But then, if I hadn’t been a fool, you know I should never have started on a lecture tour at all.  So, being a fool, I had bills printed, hired a hall (at ten dollars), and was duly announced to lecture in Tyre on the coming Tuesday evening.  The same afternoon, The Tyre Times appeared, and its editorial column contained the following notice, which I read with great interest, it being my first appearance in any periodical:—­

LECTURE AT GRECIAN HALL.—­We take pleasure in announcing that Prof.  GREEN D. BROWN, of New York city, will favor the citizens of Tyre with a lecture on Tuesday evening next.  From what we know of the gentleman, we are satisfied our citizens will not regret attending the lecture.  We trust he may not be met with an audience so small as lectures have heretofore drawn out in Tyre.  The apathy of our citizens in these matters, we have before stated, is disgraceful.  Let there be a good turn-out.

But there was not a good turn-out.  The receipts were two dollars and a half.  The proprietor of the hall consented to take the receipts for his pay, and I returned to the hotel to muse over my unhappy fortunes.

The landlord took occasion the next morning, as I was passing out of the house, to remind me that my baggage had not arrived.

‘No,’ said I, ‘but, as I soon leave Tyre, I shan’t need it.’

The landlord looked at my dirty collar and bosom as if he doubted either my sanity or my decency, and remarked that perhaps I knew his rules compelled him to present the bills of strangers semi-weekly.

‘O, yes! that’s all right,’ said I; ’I’ll see you when I come back from the printing-office.’