Barnum made another trip to New York City in his nineteenth year to investigate opportunities, of which he had been told, for a thriving lottery business in Pittsburg. An agency for the whole state of Tennessee was vacant, and the offer of it was tempting, but there was Charity Hallett, tailoress in Bethel, and Tennessee was too far from Bethel. The possibilities of profit in the lottery business impressed Barnum, and he used all the time he could spare from his store in selling lottery tickets throughout near-by Connecticut counties. He established agents throughout the surrounding country and soon was selling from five hundred dollars’ worth to two thousand dollars’ worth of lottery tickets each day. It was in this business that Barnum first used advertising. He issued handbills and circulars with extravagant language and huge pictures. Immense gold signs and posters in many colored inks covered the front of Barnum’s lottery office, and “home-made poetry” persuaded prospective purchasers. Oyster suppers at his mother’s tavern followed the drawing of prizes. Charity Hallett, the “attractive tailoress,” continued to occupy an important place in Barnum’s mind; he was still meeting her at church, and whenever the sale of oysters, lottery tickets, and general merchandise permitted him spare time. In the summer of 1829, when he was just nineteen years old, Barnum, without mentioning his intentions to his mother, proposed marriage. Those intentions must have been obvious, however, for some time, because in his autobiography Barnum wrote that his mother and his other relatives thought that his enterprise, if not his origin, entitled him to aim higher in the social scale than a local tailoress. But there were many impartial townspeople, said Barnum, who thought that Charity Hallett “was altogether too good for Taylor Barnum.” They were married that November in New York City at the house of Charity’s uncle. Barnum went on record in his autobiography as opposed to early marriages, but he hastily prefaced these admonitions with the statement, “had I waited twenty years longer, I could not have found another woman so well suited to my disposition, and so valuable as a wife, a mother, and a friend.” Barnum’s mother was angry at his secret marriage in New York, but, after a month of Sundays, he was invited to bring his wife to Sabbath dinner. During the two years after his marriage Barnum continued his country store, his lottery business, with branches in Danbury, Stamford, Norwalk, and Middletown, and found time to engage in religious and political controversy. III