So we jogged on homeward. I resumed my work. I had written out all the details of our trip in letters to the _Press_. They had excited attention. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company suggested that they should be published in a pamphlet. I did so, and called it "Three Thousand Miles in a Railroad Car." They offered to pay me a very good sum for my trouble in so doing. I declined it, because I felt that I had been amply paid by the pleasure which I had derived from the journey. But I received grateful recognition subsequently in another form. The pamphlet was most singular of its kind. It was a full report of all the statistics and vast advantages of the Kansas Pacific Road. It contained very valuable facts and figures; and it was all served up with jokes, songs, buffalo-hunting, Indians, and Brigham. It was a marvellous farrago, and it "took." It was sent to every member of Congress and "every other man." Before it appeared, a friend of mine named Ringwalt, who was both a literary man and owner of a printing-office, offered me $200 if I would secure him the printing of it. I said that I would not take the money, but that I would get him the printing, which I easily did; but being a very honourable man, he was led to discharge the obligation. One day he said to me, "Why don't you publish your 'Breitmann Ballads?' Everybody is quoting them now." I replied, "There is not a publisher in America who would accept them." And I was quite right, for there was not. He answered, "I will print them for you." I accepted the offer, but when they were set up an idea occurred to me by which I could save my friend his expenses. I went to a publisher named T. B. Peterson, who said effectively this--"The book will not sell more than a thousand copies. There will be about a thousand people who will buy it, even for fifty cents, so I shall charge that, though it would be, as books go, only as a twenty-five cent work." He took it and paid my friend for the composition. I was not to receive any money or share in the profits till all the expenses had been paid. Mr. Peterson immediately sold 2,000--4,000--I know not how many thousands--at fifty cents a copy. It was republished in Canada and Australia, to my loss. An American publisher who owned a magazine asked me, through his editor, to write for it a long Breitmann poem. I did so, making, however, an explicit verbal arrangement _that it should not be republished as a book_. It was, however, immediately republished as such, with a title to the effect that it was the "Breitmann Ballads." I appealed to the editor, and it was withdrawn, but I know not how many were issued, to my loss.