they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the
least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles for lack
of better sport. Twenty-four hours afterward these bottles would be
still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing that the ship
had not moved out of her place in all that time. The calm was absolutely
breathless, and the surface of the sea absolutely without a wrinkle.
For a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another ship that
had drifted to our vicinity, that we carried on conversations with her
passengers, introduced each other by name, and became pretty intimately
acquainted with people we had never heard of before, and have never heard
of since. This was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely
voyage. We had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed they
were at last for occupation and amusement, I will mention that the
gentlemen gave a good part of their time every day, during the calm, to
trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on its side), and
thread a needle without touching their heels to the deck, or falling
over; and the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the
enterprise with absorbing interest. We were at sea five Sundays; and
yet, but for the almanac, we never would have known but that all the
other days were Sundays too.
I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without employment.
I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a
public lecture occurred to me! I sat down and wrote one, in a fever of
hopeful anticipation. I showed it to several friends, but they all shook
their heads. They said nobody would come to hear me, and I would make a
humiliating failure of it.
They said that as I had never spoken in public, I would break down in the
delivery, anyhow. I was disconsolate now. But at last an editor slapped
me on the back and told me to “go ahead.” He said, “Take the largest
house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket.” The audacity of the
proposition was charming; it seemed fraught with practical worldly
wisdom, however. The proprietor of the several theatres endorsed the
advice, and said I might have his handsome new opera-house at half price
–fifty dollars. In sheer desperation I took it–on credit, for
sufficient reasons. In three days I did a hundred and fifty dollars’
worth of printing and advertising, and was the most distressed and
frightened creature on the Pacific coast. I could not sleep–who could,
under such circumstances? For other people there was facetiousness in
the last line of my posters, but to me it was plaintive with a pang when
I wrote it:
“Doors open at 7 1/2. The trouble will begin at 8.”
That line has done good service since. Showmen have borrowed it
frequently. I have even seen it appended to a newspaper advertisement
reminding school pupils in vacation what time next term would begin. As
those three days of suspense dragged by, I grew more and more unhappy.
I had sold two hundred tickets among my personal friends, but I feared
they might not come. My lecture, which had seemed “humorous” to me, at
first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun
seemed left, and I grieved that I could not bring a coffin on the stage
and turn the thing into a funeral. I was so panic-stricken, at last,
that I went to three old friends, giants in stature, cordial by nature,
and stormy-voiced, and said:
“This thing is going to be a failure; the jokes in it are so dim that
nobody will ever see them; I would like to have you sit in the parquette,
and help me through.”
They said they would. Then I went to the wife of a popular citizen, and
said that if she was willing to do me a very great kindness, I would be
glad if she and her husband would sit prominently in the left-hand stage-