The lecture was to be given in a building which stood somewhere in Summer Street. We were to sell the tickets to our friends and were to share in the profits. And with what will we went forth! A stranger might have thought that the city had been invaded by a gang of hold-up men. Well, the night came. We were present, eighteen of us. The editor and the business manager were absent, having been invited to attend a luncheon given by a politician. But eighteen of us were there to hear that great out-rush of the human mind. It may have been that the learning was too deep for us, that the humor was too skilfully hidden. There was a large audience and at first there was much applause, but it dropped off along about the second round. At the close, however, there came something to arouse our interest. Upon the table the lecturer emptied about a bushel of cubes wrapped in paper. “Each one of these cubes contains a piece of soap,” said he. “It is the finest that has ever been made. And this is the offer that I shall make to you: I shall sell these cubes at twenty-five cents each, and in at least half of the papers is contained a yearly subscription to the _Evening Mail_, a paper which Mr. Watterson declares is the freest and best-written journal in America. He himself is thinking of taking the editorship of it on the first day of next July. Let us open a few of these papers. Ah, we here have a subscription, here is another—another—why, there are no end of them. I will now pass out among you.” They bought his soap. He was giving our paper a boost and none save a great man could do that. Surely, the day of our prosperity was about to dawn. “I will be around early in the morning to settle for the advertisement, the tickets and the many subscriptions,” he said to one of us. “And now don’t think me presumptuous in what I said. Watterson has his eye on this paper.” He did not come around the next day. We called on the business manager and he said that no arrangements for subscriptions had been made with him. We spoke to the editor and he sighed. Then, and for days afterward, there came broken streams of people with orders for yearly subscriptions. It was difficult to explain. The most of our stockholders had been present and had heard the promises made by Major DeMaine. So we dozed off into the bed prepared by the sheriff. The last time I saw the editor he took my hand with a sigh and said: “It was a great pity that I went to that political luncheon. Ah, politics, ruination of mighty empires!”