clear.  I had used, on my own personal account, four hundred dollars during the year.  Office rent was two hundred and fifty.  My carriers had cost over a hundred dollars.  My boy one hundred and fifty, and ninety had been paid to the clerk during the first three months.  Sundry little items of expense during the year made an aggregate of over a hundred.  Paper and printing for the first three months had been nearly a thousand dollars, and for the last three quarters about twenty-two hundred dollars.

To go on with this odds against me, I had sense enough to see was perfect folly.  But, how could I stop?  I was not worth a dollar in the world; and the thought of wronging those who had trusted me in full reliance upon my integrity, produced a feeling of suffocation.  Besides, I had worked for a year as few men work.  From sunrise until twelve, one, and two o’clock, I was engaged in the business or editorial duties appertaining to my enterprise, and to abandon all after such a struggle was disheartening.

After much deliberation, I concluded that the best thing I could do was to sell out my list of subscribers to another and more successful establishment in the city, and, for this purpose, waited upon the publisher.  He heard me, and after I had finished, asked my terms.  I told him fifteen hundred dollars for the list.  He smiled, and said he wouldn’t give me five hundred for the whole concern, debts and all.  I got up, put on my hat, and left him with indignant silence.

To go on was the worst horn for me to grasp in the dilemma in which I found myself.  To stop, would be to do so with some three or four hundred persons paid in advance, for portions of a year.  I was dunned, daily, by my printer, for money, and in order to meet the notes which had already fallen due, I had been compelled to borrow temporarily from my friends.  Unable to arrive at any satisfactory conclusion, in despair, I summoned creditors and friends around me, and laid before them a full statement of my condition.  There were some long faces at that meeting; but no one felt as I did.  I shall never forget the suffering and mortification of that day, were I to live a thousand years.

The unanimous determination of the meeting was that I must stop, collect in the money due, and divide it pro rata among my creditors.  I did so; announcing, at the same time, the heavy embarrassment under which I had been brought, and earnestly soliciting those who owed the paper, to settle their accounts immediately.  To the few who had paid the fraction of a year in advance, I stated how much I had lost, and appealed to their magnanimity for a remission of the obligation I remained under to furnish the paper for the time yet due to them.  It was but the matter of a few cents, or a dollar at most to them, I said, but it was hundreds of dollars to me.