The Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. | Page 8

He would not so much
as allow me a clean shirt; and I started for Tyre, wishing from the
bottom of my heart that the inhuman landlord might engage in a
washing-machine speculation, and involve with himself Mr. Potkins
and Mr. Dobson and Mr. Dickson and Dr. Tomson and Squire Johnson.
I reached Tyre at ten o'clock, and found that I had not been deceived
respecting its size. It was quite a large Tillage, with well laid out streets,
handsome residences, two large hotels, and three or four churches. I
took this inventory of the principal objects in Tyre with considerable
more anxiety than I had ever supposed it possible for me to entertain
concerning any country town in Christendom. I was interested in the
prosperity of Tyre. I sincerely hoped that the hard times had not entered
its quiet and beautiful streets. The streets certainly were both quiet and
beautiful, as I looked upon them in the clear moonlight of ten o'clock at
night, an hour when honest people in the country are, for the most part,
asleep. I entered the handsomest of the hotels, and registered my name
in a bran-new book on the clerk's counter.
Name.
Residence.
Destination.

_Prof. D.G. Brown, N.Y. City. Lecture in Tyre_.
'Beautiful evening, sir,' said the clerk, who was also the landlord, but
not also the bar-tender and the hostler.
'You are right, sir,' said I; 'it is truly a lovely evening. I have rarely seen
moonlight so beautiful. Indeed, such were the beauties of the evening,
that I have positively been tempted so far as to walk over here from
Sidon this evening, leaving my baggage to follow me in the morning.'
'Ah! lectured in Sidon perhaps?'
'Well, ah! um! yes; that is, I intend to do so, but unforeseen
circumstances induced me to relinquish that purpose. Sidon is very
small.'
'Yes, sir, small place. Never heard of a lecture, or any kind of a
performance, there before. Fact is, they're a hard set over to Sidon, and
the place is better known by the name of Sodom around here.'
I felt much encouraged at hearing this; for, to tell the truth, my
cogitations as I tramped over the rough road between Tyre and Sidon
had been anything but cheerful. This was a realization of my fond
dreams of a ten-to-fifty-dollars-a-night lecture tour, such as I had
hardly anticipated, and as I drew nigh unto Tyre I had been thinking
whether I had not better try to get a situation as a farm-hand or
dry-goods clerk before my troubles should have crushed me and driven
me to suicide.
But the landlord cheered me. Tyre was a model town. Tyre had a
newspaper, and Tyre patronized literary entertainments. There was a
good hall in Tyre, and the Tyrians had filled it to overflowing last
winter when Chapin spoke there. I went to bed under the benignant
influence of my cheerful host, and dreamed of lecturing to an audience
of many thousands in a hall a trifle larger than the Academy of Music,
and with every nook and corner crowded with enthusiastic listeners,
whose joy culminated with my peroration into such a tumult of delight
that they rushed upon the stage and hoisted me on their shoulders amid

cheers so boisterous that they awoke me. I found I had left my bed and
mounted into a window, with the intention, doubtless, of stepping into
the street and concluding my career at once, lest an anti-climax should
be my fate.
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