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

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 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