Reverting again to my first summer, I have a little incident to relate: One evening I was introduced to a middle-aged, sharp-looking little man, who, I was informed, was the principal of a flourishing college in a Western State--a college in a town, both of which he had himself founded. This gentleman and I managed to spend the evening together pleasantly enough, but my astonishment was great next morning when I received a letter from him offering me a situation in his establishment. I had an interview with him, and concluding from all the appearances that the location was a healthy and civilized one, the school a prosperous one, and himself an energetic, cultivated gentleman, I was on the point of accepting, when it suddenly occurred to me that in my anxiety to learn whether the position was desirable in other respects not a word had been said on the subject of salary. My expressing a wish to be enlightened upon this important particular produced an immediate hitch in the negotiations, but the practical upshot was that the greater part of my salary was to consist virtually of unreclaimed land! Since that magnificent occasion I have regarded with magnanimous forbearance requisitions emanating from that portion of the West. At last, however, my answer to an advertisement was successful, and in September I was duly installed as teacher of the classics in a school of some fifty boys in one of the three cities I have mentioned. The following extract from the principal's letter of engagement will show what is naturally the chief difficulty an English teacher has to encounter in his search for an employer in the United States: "On the whole, I think the most favorably of you out of some forty applicants; the only fear I have arising from the well-known fact that American lads are so unlike those of the old country, and require different methods of discipline."