A basin of cold water on a sentimental serenader could not have produced a greater revulsion of feeling than did this unlooked-for return of my collector.  Nineteen dollars and fifty cents, instead of about two hundred dollars, were all he had been able to gather up; there was no promise of success in the future on any different scale.  I received the money, less ten per cent. for collecting, and was left alone to my own reflections.  Not of the most pleasant kind, the reader may well imagine.  For an hour I brooded over the strangely embarrassing position in which I found myself, and then, after thinking until my head was hot and my feet and hands cold, I determined to reduce, immediately, the edition of my paper from three thousand to one thousand, and thus save an item of thirty dollars a week in paper and press-work.  To send off my clerk, also, to whom I was paying seven dollars weekly, and with the aid of a boy, attend to the office, and do the writing and mailing myself.  I then went over the subscription-book, and counted up the names.  The number was just seven hundred and twenty.  I had but a little while before replied to a question on the subject, that I had about twelve hundred on my list.  And I did vaguely imagine that I had that number.  I knew better now.

To describe minutely the trials, sufferings, and disappointments of the whole year, would take too much time and space.  The subsequent returns of my collector were about on a par with the first.  Finding it impossible to pay the printer and paper maker, as promised, out of the advance subscriptions falling due at the end of three months, I borrowed from some of my friends about four hundred dollars, and paid it over, stating, when I did so, that I must have a new contract, based upon a six months’ credit.

I found no great difficulty in obtaining this from the paper maker, to whom I spoke in confident terms of my certain ultimate success.  The printer required half cash, which I agreed to pay.

This arrangement I fondly hoped would give me time to make my collections, and, besides paying off the debt already accumulated, enable me to acquire a surplus to meet the notes given, from time to time, for paper and printing.

At the end of a year, my list, through various exertions and sacrifices, had arisen to twelve hundred.  On this I had collected eight hundred dollars, and I calculated that there were about sixteen hundred dollars due me, which, I thought, if all collected in, would about square me up with the world.  This I thought.  But, when I came to go over my bill-book and ledger, I found, to my utter dismay, that I owed three thousand five hundred dollars!  This must be a mistake, I said, and went over my books again.  The result was as at first.  I owed the money, and no mistake.  But how it was, I could not for some time comprehend.  But a series of memorandums from my cash-book, and an examination of printers’ and paper makers’ bills, at length made all