No one that I can recall specifically thanked me at the time of that editorial convention, though no doubt the usual resolutions thanking the orator and poet were passed. I should be glad to believe that at the ball which crowned our festival some kind woman-soul may have tried to feign a pleasure in my verse which no man-soul attempted; but I have only the memory of my fearful joy in the dance which I seem to have led. I went back to Columbus with such heart as I could, but in the dense foreshortening of the time's events I cannot find that of my own unhorsing from the shining procession of journalists figured in my poem. I can only be sure that I _was_ unhorsed, and then suddenly, to my great joy and even greater surprise, was caught up and given a new mount, with even larger pay. That is, I was now invited to become professional reader for the young publisher who had issued the _Poems of Two Friends_, and who, apparently inspired by the signal failure of that book, imagined establishing a general publishing business in our capital. He followed it with several very creditable books, and he seems to have had the offer of many more manuscripts than he could handle. I have no doubt I dealt faithfully with these, and I know that he confided entirely in my judgment, for I was now twenty-three, without a doubt of my own as to my competence. There was one manuscript, offered by a lady who had lived some years in Chile, which I thought so interesting, though so formless, that I wrote it quite over, and my friend published it in a book which I should like to read again; but I have no hope of ever seeing it. He also published a very good Ohio version of Gautier's _Romance of a Mummy_, but our bravest venture was a book which the publisher himself had fancied doing, and which he had fancied my writing. This was the life of Abraham Lincoln, printed with his speeches in the same volume with the life and speeches of Hannibal Hamlin, who was nominated with him on the Presidential ticket at the Republican Convention in 1860. It was the expectation of my friend, the very just and reasonable expectation, that I should go to Springfield, Illinois, and gather the material for the work from Lincoln himself, and from his friends and neighbors. But this part of the project was distasteful to me, was impossible; I felt that there was nothing of the interviewer in me, at a time when the interviewer was not yet known by name even to himself. Not the most prophetic soul of the time, not the wisest observer of events, could have divined my loss; and I was no seer. I would not go, and I missed the greatest chance of my life in its kind, though I am not sure I was wholly wrong, for I might not have been equal to that chance; I might not have seemed to the man whom I would not go to see, the person to report him to the world in a campaign life. What we did was to commission a young law student of those I knew, to go to Springfield and get the material for me.