After our tea that evening the head of the house began to question me about my trip, and I saw that a detailed story of it was what he wanted. So I began with the first town that I had stopped at, and gave him a history of the trip. He seemed to enjoy it, and to pick up a good many items from it. “Yes,” he said, “business is becoming less profitable every year. The idiots who are going to get rich by selling flour at 25 cents a barrel less than cost, simply by doing a h--l of a business, are multiplying. Reachum can probably sell goods close and make money, as he has no traveling men; his principal expense is his postal cards. Simmons & Hibbard can sell our goods low because it is only one department of a large business with them, and its proportion of expenses is not great. We will be compelled to do either less or more; either do a smaller business in guns and ammunition and at less expense, or to put in other goods and drum a larger variety of trade. We have pretty much decided to do the latter. What do you think of it?” I laughingly suggested that in Cleveland and Indianapolis some of the houses were adding a silver mine to their stock, and that we ought to have one too. “And then compel the traveling-men to buy or not give them orders? That would be a good scheme. But I had not thought of that. Our plan is to lay in a line of goods that will work in well with general trade and sell all the year round.” I said I thought it was a capital idea. “Will you give up the stock and go on the road regularly?” What? Go on the road regularly? Not a bit of it. Keep on, month after month, year after year, hammering after orders? No, oh, no! “Then you don't like it?” No, I did not. There was altogether too much anxiety about it for me. There were men so constituted that they did not feel worried whether they got an order or not. They were the proper men to travel. But I was nervous and anxious, and worried when I had no order for fear I was not going to get one; and then worried after I had one, fearing I would not get any more. No, I was not made of the right kind of stuff for a traveling man.