Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1914-07-05


smoke but still perfect, and force it upon
you at half the price. For Dickens and all
the wonderful people who are his creation,
you cannot find place by your hearthsides;
-shh-s-h-h! don't mention it to single
soul!-the publisher of this set has committed
suicide, and his wife, who has no business
sense and is mentally unbalanced by the
shock is letting these few sets go at price
that is perfectly ruinous.
You almost upset the inkwell in reaching
for your checkbook You fairly implore
you hand me the names of three friends who
will help me along in the poor woman's ruin.
WHO'S knocking at the door? Thack-
w eray. Thackeray? Never heard of
the man. He can't come in.
He says that he'll bring you the most
wonderful stories in the English language,
that he'll introduce you to men and women
with whom you can laugh and weep and
grow wise and tender and happy, and gen.
orally more worth while.
Never mind, he can't come in.
He says that all the wise men in the world
have admitted him to their houses, and
would rather go without bread and butter
or high-heeled boots or priZe-hght tickets
than to lose him.
1t makes no difference. I'm busy.
But he says, Sir, that there's twenty vol
umes of him, and it won't cost you cent
The government seized the volumes for
duty, and is giving them away. All you
have to pay for is the binding.
What's that? No charge?
Not cent, Sir, and he says he doesn't care
whether you take them or not. There are
only hundred sets, and he'll substitute an
other name for yours on the list if you say so.
Wait! Call him back Tell him l want
them. Thackeray-why,o of course | want
Thackeray! And free, you say2 Why, of
course. I've wanted Thackeray all my life
So Thackeray comes into your home,
shame faced and dropping, where he should
walk royalty. And I, over whose trampled
soul he has made his entrance, slip away
into outer darkness.
l have made successful sale; l have
widened by a fraction of an inch the shining
circle of enlightenment; l have got ava
with my canvass"
For know you that so long as human
nature in America is the strange dollars and
cents thing thatitis, so long as dollar
clothes are marked up to eighteen dollars,
and then marked down again, so long as the
word free in advertisements pulls hundred
inquiries where the words Is carat pull one,
SO long will there be canvasses in the world.
On each quiet veranda of fifty homes in
~ certain Western city woman stands
every morning shading her eyes and look
ing away into the east. And each morning,
as the long look reveals no cloud of dust
upon the horizon, each one of the fifty turns
back to her work, her faith little more faded.
What is she looking for?
For me! Some day she knows that am
coming back there, because l told her so.
l sold her and her forty-nine friends fifty
sets of the works of Rudyard Kipling. They
helped me sell them; they went from house
to house with me to get the last five orders
Why? Because promised them that when
the fiftieth order was signed, when the @Kip-
ling Klub" was complete, the great and good
publisher whom represented would build
the members beautiful clubhouse So every
morning they stand for a moment on their
verandas and look longingly into the east; for
some morning, they know, will come riding
down Main street at the head of an army
of worknen with banners, and will erect the
clubhouse in the public square, on the vacant
lot opposite the Baptist Church, which was
the location that we all agreed upon