no prevarication. It was plumb
drippin' with moral from start to finish. You see Eve she set the ball
a-rollin' when she swiped them apples. That was where she done dead
wrong, and that was the 'Sin' as mentioned in the name of the book, an'
old W. P. Mills he showed in that literary volume how everybody has had
to pay the 'Wages' ever since. It was great. I never read anything else
moral that I could say I really hankered for, but I sure did enjoy that
book. Old W. P. Mills was a wonder at poetry.

"It beat all how vivid he made all them Old Testament people, an' the
things they did. Why, I never cared two cents for Shadrach, Meshach, an'
Abednego before I read that book, but after I read it I never could git
them lines of W. P.'s out of my head--

'The King perhaps that moment saw A thing that filled his soul with
awe-Shadrach and Meshach, to and fro, Walked and talked with Abednego.'

"I tell you, you can't obliterate them three men out of your mind when
you read that verse once. You see them walkin' in that fiery furnace,
even when you're in your little bed; walkin' an' carryin' on a
conversation, which, when you come to think of it, was the most natural
thing for them to be doin'. You wouldn't look to see them sit down on
a hot log, or to stand still sayin' nothin'. Walk an' talk, that's what
they did, an' it's what anybody would do in similar circumstances. I
guess fiery furnaces has that effect all the world over, but it took W.
P. Mills to see it with his mind's eye, an' put it into verses.

"So, when Sammy gently intimated to me that it was his pa's book we was
to canvass, the job looked different. I might shy at an encyclopedia, or
at a life of Stephen A. Douglas, but to handle a moral volume like
the 'Wage of Sin' sort of appealed to the financial morality of my
conscience. So I asked Sammy what the gentlemanly canvassers would get
out of it.

"'Pa had a lot of faith in that lyric poem,' says Sammy to me, 'an' no
one had a better right to, for he wrote it himself, but the publishing
game was dull an' depressed about the time he got ready to issue it
forth, an' he was necessitated to compensate the cost of printing it
himself. And,' he says, 'the rush an' hurry of the public to buy that
book is such it reminds me of the eagerness of a kid to get spanked. So
I figger we can get several wagon-loads of "Wage of Sin" at fifty cents
per volume.'

"'That's a cheap price,' I says, 'That's two hundred verses fo