But Mr. Boldt, the manager of the hotel, had placed a suite of rooms at
my disposal without money and without price. He treated me most
cordially; never referred to the outrageous things I had said about his
tavern; assured me that he enjoyed my writings, and told me of the
pleasure he had in welcoming me.

Thus did he heap hot cinders upon my occiput. The Astor gallery seats
eight hundred people. Major Pond had packed in nine hundred at one dollar
each--three hundred were turned away. After the lecture the Major awaited
me in the anteroom, fell on my neck and rained Pond's Extract down my
back, crying: "Oh! Oh! Oh! Why didn't we charge them two dollars apiece!"

The next move was to make a tour of the principal cities under Major
Pond's management. Neither of us lost money--the Major surely did not.

Last season I gave eighty-one lectures, with a net profit to myself of a
little over ten thousand dollars. I spoke at Tremont Temple in Boston, to
twenty-two hundred people; at Carnegie Hall, New York; at Central Music
Hall, Chicago. I spoke to all the house would hold; at Chautauqua, my
audience was five thousand people. It will be noted by the Discerning
that my lectures have been of double importance, in that they have given
an income and at the same time advertised the Roycroft Wares.

The success of the Roycroft Shop has not been brought about by any one
scheme or plan. The business is really a combination of several ideas,
any one of which would make a paying enterprise in itself. So it stands
about thus:

First, the printing and publication of three magazines.