l of yearnin' minds,
clamorous for mental improvement at one fifty per volume. It's our duty
to chuck them poems into them minds, an' to intellectooally subside them
clamors.'

"I shook my head quite strenuous.

"'Nix for me!' I remarked; 'no book-agenting for me.'

"'Who said book-agenting?" asked Sammy, deeply offended. 'Do you
calculate that the son of a high-class author of a famous an' helpful
book would turn book agent? Never!'

"'What then?' I asks him.

"'Just a little salubrious an' entertainin' canvassin' for a work of
genius,' he says. 'A few heart-to-heart talks with the educated ladies
of Gallops Junction an' Tomville on the beauties of the "Wage of Sin."
That ain't no book-agenting,' says he, 'that's pickin' money off the
trees. It's pie ready cut an' handed to us on a plate with a gilt edge.
All we've got to do is to bite it.'

"No, let me tell you right here, Pap, that the 'Wage of Sin' was a
thoroughbred treat to read. It was a moral book. Next to the Bible it
was the morallest book I ever tackled, an' when W. P. Mills wrote that
book he gave the literatoor of the U.S.A. a boost in the right direction
that it hasn't recovered from yet. It was the champion long distance
poem of the nineteenth century. That book showed what a chunky an'
nervous mind old W. P Mills had. There was ten thousand verses to that
book of poem, partitioned off into various an' sundry parts so the read
thereof could sit up an' draw breath about every thousand verses, an'
get his full wind ready for the run through the next slice.

"That 'Wage of Sin' book was surely for to admire, any way you looked at
it. Take the subject; it wasn't any of your little, sawed-off, one-year
sprints. No siree! W. P. Mills started away back in the front vestibule
of time. He said, right in the preface--an' that was all poetry, too--

Now, reader, go along with me Away back to eternity, A hundred thousand
years, and still Keep backing backwards if you will.

"An' when he got away back there he sort of expectorated on his hands
an' started in at Genesis, Chapter One, Verse One, an' went right along
down through the Bible like a cross-cut saw through a cottonwood log. He
never missed a single event that was important, if true. He got all them
old fellers rhymed right into that book--Jereboam, Rehoboam, Meschach,
Schadrach, an' Abednego, an' all the whole caboodle, from Adam with an A
to Zaccheus with a Z.

"That certain was a moral tome, an'