and called me `a fool.' Don't you think they were right?"

Then we sauntered up Euclid Street, under the shade of its avenue of
trees. As we went along, Artemus Ward recounted to me the story of
his becoming a lecturer. Our conversation on that agreeable evening
is fresh in my remembrance. Memory still listens to the voice of my
companion in the stroll, still sees the green trees of Euclid Street
casting their shadows across our path, and still joins in the laugh
with Artemus, who, having just returned from California, where he
had taken sixteen hundred dollars at one lecture, did not think that
to be evidence of his having lost his senses.

The substance of that which Artemus Ward then told me was, that
while writing for the "Cleveland Plain Dealer" he was accustomed, in
the discharge of his duties as a reporter, to attend the
performances of the various minstrel troups and circuses which
visited the neighbourhood. At one of these he would hear some story
of his own, written a month or two previously, given by the
"middle-man" of the minstrels and received with hilarity by the
audience. At another place he would be entertained by listening to
jokes of his own invention, coarsely retailed by the clown of the
ring, and shouted at by the public as capital waggery on the part of
the performer. His own good things from the lips of another "came
back to him with alienated majesty," as Emerson expresses it. Then
the thought would steal over him--Why should that man gain a living
with my witticisms, and I not use them in the same way myself? why
not be the utterer of my own coinage, the quoter of my own jests,
the mouthpiece of my own merry conceits? Certainly, it was not a
very exalted ambition to aim at the glories of a circus clown or the
triumphs of a minstrel with a blackened face. But, in the United