“Certainly; the price of the paper is to be two dollars.”

“I doubt, my young friend, very much, whether you will receive four thousand dollars from three thousand subscribers, if you should have that number.  Nay, if you get three thousand during the year, you may be very thankful.”

“Preposterous!” said I.

“No; not by any means.  I have been over this ground before you, and know pretty much what kind of harvest it yields.”

“But,” said I, “it is not my intention to throw the paper into every man’s house, whether he wants it or not.  I will only take good subscribers.”

“You would call Mr. B——­, over the way, a good subscriber, I presume?”

“Oh yes!” I replied, “I would very much like to have a few thousand like him.”

“And Mr. Y——­, his next-door neighbour?”

“Yes—­he is good, of course.”

“That is, able to pay.”

“And willing.”

“I happen to know, my young friend, that neither of those men will pay a subscription to any thing if they can help it.”

“Not to a work to which they have regularly subscribed?”

“No.”

“That is as much as to say that they are dishonest men.”

“You can say that or any thing else you please; I only give you the information for your own government.  You will find a good many like them.  Somehow or other, people seem to have a great aversion to paying newspaper bills.  I don’t know how it is, but such is the fact.  And if you will take the advice of one who knows a good deal more about the business than you do, you will go to wood-sawing in preference to starting a newspaper.  You may succeed, but in ten chances, there are nine on the side of failure.”

I shrugged my shoulders and looked incredulous.

“Oh, very well!” said he, “go on and try for yourself.  Bought wit is the best, if you don’t pay too dear for it.  You are young yet, and a little experience of this kind may do you no harm in the long run.”

“I’m willing to take the risk, for I think I have counted the cost pretty accurately.  As for a failure, I don’t mean to know the word.  There is a wide field of enterprise before me, and I intend to occupy it fully.”

The old gentleman shrugged his shoulders in return, but volunteered no more of his good advice.

A week before the first number of the “Gazette and Reflex” was ready, I called in my prospectuses, in order to have the thousand or fifteen hundred names they contained regularly entered in the subscription-books with which I had provided myself.  I had rented an office and employed a clerk.  These were two items of expense that had not occurred to me when making my first calculation.  It was rather a damper on the ardency of my hopes, to find, that instead of the large number of subscribers I had fondly expected to receive, the aggregate from all quarters was but two hundred!