small total. We found close at hand, in 20th Street, a cheap clean German restaurant--Krisch's--where a meal of sorts could be had for 30 cents, tip 5 cents; it had a sanded floor and was half bier-stube, and one of its smiling waiters, Otto--he came from the Black Forest where I had been to school--proved a true friend later, allowing us occasional credit at his own risk; a Chinese laundry was looked up in Fourth Avenue; I spent one of our precious dollars in a small store of fiddle strings against a possible evil day--a string meant more to me than a steak--and we were then ready for our campaign.
Not a minute was lost. Kay, in very sanguine mood, the Irving wig, I shrewdly suspected, in his pocket, went out to interview managers; while I took a train down-town to interview Harper's, as being the most important publishing house I knew. This step was the result of many discussions with Kay, who said he was sure I could write. The Red Indian advice of the Edinburgh "spirit" had impressed him. "That's your line," he assured me. "Try the magazines." I felt no similar assurance, no desire to write was in me; we had worked ourselves up to a conviction that bold, immediate action was the first essential of our position; to get pupils for my two languages or shorthand seemed impossible in a city like New York; therefore I hurried down, with vague intentions but a high heart, to Harper's.
There was the Magazine, the Weekly, and Harper's Young People. One of them surely would listen to my tale. I chose the Weekly for some unknown reason. For some equally unknown reason I was admitted to the editor's sanctum, and, still more strange, Richard Harding Davis listened to my tale. His success as a novelist had just begun; he had left the Evening Sun, where his "Van Bibber" stories had made him first known; his popularity was rising fast, though I had never heard of him.
My tale was brief, having been rehearsed in the train. It took, perhaps, three minutes at most to rattle it off--my parentage, my farm and hotel, my interest in Eastern
Thought, my present destitution, and I remember adding,
