In the morning, I called on the editor of the newspaper.

I desire to recommend my reader to subscribe at once to _The Tyre
Times_, and thus aid to sustain the paper of a gentleman and a scholar,
who was, as editors usually are, a plain-spoken, sensible man, conscious
of the presence of talent in his sanctum, by 'sympathetic attraction.'
The editor of the _Times_ looked into the circumstances of my case with
an experienced and kindly eye, and then said to me,--

'My dear sir, you can not succeed here with a lecture. We have had
several in our village within a few years, but never one which 'paid,'
unless it was one on phrenology, or physiology, or psychology, and
plentifully spiced with humor of the coarsest sort. If you want to make
money in Tyre, you'll take my advice and get a two-headed calf, a
learned pig, or a band of nigger minstrels. Any of these things will
answer your purpose, if you want money; but if you have ambition to
gratify, if you want to lecture for the sake of lecturing, that's a
different thing. At all events, you shall have my good wishes, and I'll
do all I can to get you a house. But it won't pay.'

The reader knows that if I had not been a fool I would have understood
and heeded a statement so plain as this, made by an editor. But then, if
I hadn't been a fool, you know I should never have started on a lecture
tour at all. So, being a fool, I had bills printed, hired a hall (at ten
dollars), and was duly announced to lecture in Tyre on the coming
Tuesday evening. The same afternoon, _The Tyre Times_ appeared, and its
editorial column contained the following notice, which I read with great
interest, it being my first appearance in any periodical:--