during this six months, and thus acquired a style of simple expression
which would be of value to him in his reports when he should travel. He
read Plutarch's Lives. He studied French, and read "The Man Who Laughs"
and "Paul and Virginia," two remarkably different works. You see he was
a man of persistence. But such a mind finds the humiliation of a dollar
and a quarter a week all the more bitter. A man conversing with Plutarch
about the relative merits of Pompey and Lucullus, or of Marius and
Sylla, dislikes to be


DOCKED THREE HOURS

for being ten minutes late, and dislikes to return to his landlady at
the end of the week and give her five-sevenths of the whole spoil of
Bythnia and the Propontis! One day the second assistant manager spoke to
him, and this ray of hope lit his way to a seat on a high stool to write
out "tickets" for merchants who send in to see about Blow & Co., of
Bugleville. This gave him eight dollars a week, and enabled him to go to
a theatre once in a while and hear


SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS.

One night he approached his friend and announced that the die was cast,
and that he should become an actor. Nothing could be worse than he was
doing. Absolutely no business paid less than eight dollars per week,
unless it were his own itself which had paid him seven dollars. It was a
summer month. A theatre was empty. A dramatic agent had agreed to get up
a company and run the place a week. It would require only twenty-five