One day we had occasion to go to a small station to take the cars for Fort Wayne, when the telegraph operator left his office for a few minutes to go after the mail. I stepped to the instrument, called the Toledo office, and sent a message to our late landlord at Napoleon, as follows: "Send to my partner and me two dozen cream biscuit to Fort Wayne, express prepaid. We need them." After checking the message _dead head_, signed my name, and returned to the waiting-room. When the operator returned, the Toledo office, whose duty it was to transfer the message to Napoleon, called him up and asked who Johnston was; and wanted to know further, why his message should be dead-headed. The operator answered that he knew nothing about it, and didn't think it was his business to inquire into other people's affairs. They told him he had better wake up and know what he was doing; and said it was his duty to collect pay for messages, and not send them for nothing. I listened attentively to what passed between them; but finally our side won by his saying that he wanted them to understand he was running that office himself, and needed no advice. The next day after reaching Fort Wayne, we received a letter from the landlord, in which he stated that it would be impossible for him to send cream biscuit by express, but said: "Please find enclosed the recipe for making them." We gladly accepted it, and had the pastry cooks at different hotels make them for us, which greatly pleased every one else who partook of them, besides ourselves. Later on, I made use of the recipe by presenting it to my aunt, Mrs. Frances E. Owens, and it has long been one of the favorite recipes of Mrs. Owens' Cook Book. From Fort Wayne we went back through Ohio and stopped at Findlay, where, just as we were about to close a trade, I received a letter from the patentee saying he had bargained to sell out all his right to one man, and requested me to return the papers at once, and not to make another sale under any circumstances. I complied with his request. The next day we met on the streets of Findlay a gentleman having a sample band-cutter--an attachment for a two-tined fork, to be used when threshing. The man who pitched the bundles from the stack to the machine cut the bands on each bundle at the same time he pitched them. This had just been patented, and he was anxious to have us take the agency for the United States. We concluded to do so, and went to a lawyer's office and fixed up a Power of Attorney for the whole United States from him to me. Profiting from my experience in losing a good sale, as just related, I had the following clause added: "This Power of Attorney is revocable upon thirty days notice from the said patentee."