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Updated: May 19, 2025
"Gentlemen," he said to them, "I shall quietly divide the jury into watches, under your charge: ten can sleep, while one wakes to keep Mr. Smith discussing the question. I don't propose to have the night wasted." And, by one man or another, Eli was kept awake. "I don't see," said the book-agent, "why you should feel obliged to stick it out any longer. Of course, you are under obligations.
ELIZABETH ELIZA. And all they would say was, "Turn right round you are on the road to Providence." MRS. PETERKIN. As if we could turn right round! That was just what we couldn't. MOTHER. You don't mean you kept on all the way to Providence? ELIZABETH ELIZA. O dear, no! We kept on and on, till we met a man with a black hand-bag black leather I should say. JULIA. He must have been a book-agent.
"Why didn't she say so?" returned Heppy in an aggrieved voice. "How's I to know she wasn't a book-agent or a body selling home-made laces and embroidered shirt waists. She was carrying a bag and it might have been full of wares for all I knew." "But she doesn't look like a peddler." "Looks belie folks sometimes. Some of 'em is dressed as good as the best, in hats with feathers and kid gloves.
When a book-agent comes in here, for instance, and holds me up for nineteen dollars a volume for a set of Kipling in words of one syllable, illustrated by his aunt, and every volume autographed by his uncle's step-sister, it's a game of wits between us as to whether I shall buy or not buy, and if he gets away with my signature to a contract it is because he has legitimately outwitted me.
"Sometimes," said the book-agent, picking his teeth with a quill, "you'll go to a house, and they'll say they can't be induced to buy a book of any kind, historical, fictitious, or religious; but you just keep on talking, and show the pictures 'Grant in Boyhood, 'Grant a Tanner, 'Grant at Head-quarters, 'Grant in the White House, 'Grant before Queen Victoria, and they warm up, I tell you, and not infrequently buy."
You may say, as regards Mr. Burrage, that it's a queer taste in a gentleman; but there is no arguing about that. It's queer taste in a lady, too; for she is a lady, poor Olive. You can see that to-night. She is dressed like a book-agent, but she is more distinguished than any one here. Verena, beside her, looks like a walking advertisement." When Mrs.
Only pausing for a moment, as even a book-agent might, after many repeated rebuffs, Garrison wended his way across the street, proceeded slowly up the concrete walk, ascended the steps, and rang the bell. There was no result. He rang again, and out of the corner of his eye beheld the curtain pushed a trifle aside, in the window near at hand, where someone looked out from this concealment.
No man writing his memoirs for the enlightenment of posterity would ever dream of setting down upon paper the story of how a book-agent robbed him of two-hundred dollars, but the chap who has been held up in the dark recesses of a forest on a foggy night by a Jack Sheppard would always find breathless and eager listeners to or readers of the tale he had to tell, even if he lost only a nickel by the transaction."
But Leander wuzn't to be satisfied with the common things uv airth; he didn't seem to take no pleasure in his grandchildren like most men do; his mind wuz allers sot on somethin' else, for hours 'nd hours, yes, all day long, he'd set out on the front stoop lookin' wistfully up the road for that book-agent to come along with a cyclopeedy.
I coughed, yet no sign but a deeper scowl. I stepped in and modestly kicked over a chair. He whirled around like I had shot him. "Well?" he interrogated. I said, "I am powerful glad of it. I was afraid you were sick, you looked in such pain." He looked at me a minute, then grinned and said he thought I was a book-agent. Fancy me, a fat, comfortable widow, trying to sell books!
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