The new convert was made one of the secretaries of the democratic meeting, and placed in the list of speakers.  He wrote me jubilantly of what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech.  All right—­but think of his innocent and pathetic candor in writing me something like this, a week later: 

“I was more diffident than I had expected to be, and this was increased by the silence with which I was received when I came forward; so I seemed unable to get the fire into my speech which I had calculated upon, and presently they began to get up and go out; and in a few minutes they all rose up and went away.”

How could a man uncover such a sore as that and show it to another?  Not a word of complaint, you see—­only a patient, sad surprise.

3.  His next project was to write a burlesque upon Paradise Lost.

4.  Then, learning that the Times was paying Harte $100 a column for stories, he concluded to write some for the same price.  I read his first one and persuaded him not to write any more.

5.  Then he read proof on the N. Y. Eve.  Post at $10 a week and meekly observed that the foreman swore at him and ordered him around “like a steamboat mate.”

6.  Being discharged from that post, he wanted to try agriculture—­was sure he could make a fortune out of a chicken farm.  I gave him $900 and he went to a ten-house village a miles above Keokuk on the river bank —­this place was a railway station.  He soon asked for money to buy a horse and light wagon,—­because the trains did not run at church time on Sunday and his wife found it rather far to walk.

For a long time I answered demands for “loans” and by next mail always received his check for the interest due me to date.  In the most guileless way he let it leak out that he did not underestimate the value of his custom to me, since it was not likely that any other customer of mine paid his interest quarterly, and this enabled me to use my capital twice in 6 months instead of only once.  But alas, when the debt at last reached $1800 or $2500 (I have forgotten which) the interest ate too formidably into his borrowings, and so he quietly ceased to pay it or speak of it.  At the end of two years I found that the chicken farm had long ago been abandoned, and he had moved into Keokuk.  Later in one of his casual moments, he observed that there was no money in fattening a chicken on 65 cents worth of corn and then selling it for 50.

7.  Finally, if I would lend him $500 a year for two years, (this was 4 or 5 years ago,) he knew he could make a success as a lawyer, and would prove it.  This is the pension which we have just increased to $600.  The first year his legal business brought him $5.  It also brought him an unremunerative case where some villains were trying to chouse some negro orphans out of $700.  He still has this case.  He has waggled it around through various courts and made some booming speeches on it.