told Jonathan he might have the dictionary and welcome. He was doing a
sensible thing, and he would use it twenty times as much as I should.
As for the ticket, he had better keep it. I did not want it. But I saw
he would feel better if I took it,--so he indorsed it to me.

Now the reader must know that this Burrham was a man who had got hold of
one corner of the idea of what the Public could do for its children. He
had found out that there were a thousand people who would be glad to
make the tour of the mountains and the lakes every summer if they could
do it for half-price. He found out that the railroad companies were glad
enough to put the price down if they could be sure of the thousand
people. He mediated between the two, and so "cheap excursions" came into
being. They are one of the gifts the Public gives its children. Rising
from step to step, Burrham had, just before the great financial crisis,
conceived the idea of a great cheap combination, in which everybody was
to receive a magazine for a year and a cyclopaedia, both at half-price;
and not only so, but the money that was gained in the combination was to
be given by lot to two ticket-holders, one a man and one a woman, for
their dowry in marriage. I dare say the reader remembers the prospectus.
It savors too much of the modern "Gift Enterprise" to be reprinted in
full; but it had this honest element, that everybody got more than he
could get for his money in retail. I have my magazine, the old _Boston
Miscellany_, to this day, and I just now looked out Levasseur's name in
my cyclopaedia; and, as you will see, I have reason to know that all the
other subscribers got theirs.

One of the tickets for these books, for which Whittemore had given five
good dollars, was what he gave to me for my dictionary. And so we
parted. I loitered at Attica, hoping for a place where I could put in my
oar. But my hand was out at teaching, and in a time when all the world's
veneers of different kinds were ripping off, nobody wanted me to put on
more of my kind,--so that my cash ran low. I would not go in debt,--that
is a thing I never did. More honest, I say, to go to the poorhouse, and
make the Public care for its child there, than to borrow what you cannot
pay. But I did not come quite to that, as you shall see.

I was counting up my money one night,--and it was easily done,--when I
observed that the date on this Burrham order was the 15th of October,
and it occurred to me tha