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4 In Norfolk my success was varied. As I succeeded during my first trip in making a few good sized sales, my employer determined to have me work Norfolk, along with Baltimore and Washington, every month. Of the florists I saw in Norfolk at that time, not one is in existence today. There were Taggart and Wilbur, true type of Southern gentlemen, ever polite, considerate and amiable. Mr. Taggart was a man of few words, at first impressing you as being somewhat suspicious of the wiles and methods of an enthusiastic salesman, but by degrees relenting and reposing full confidence in the man who came up to his promises.

A Lecture on the Evils of Drink It was the custom at that time to be sociable, in the sense of inviting a customer who favored one with an order to a social drink. I thought it was my duty to extend the invitation to Mr. Taggart, and thereby strengthen the favorable impression which it seemed to me I had made upon him. But horror of horrors! Mr. Taggart proved to be not only a teetotaler, but a strong Prohibitionist as well. The stare he gave me, and the lecture he felt in duty bound to deliver me there and then upon the evil of drink and all the evils real and imaginary consequent upon drink, were enough to make a teetotaler of me for the next few weeks at least. I do not mean to imply that I am a drinking man; there is nothing more abhorrent than a traveling salesman approaching his customer with a whisky breath. Young men who have not as yet formed their habits should by all means abstain from these evils, for if anything will hamper success for a traveling man on the road, drink will accomplish it. Of course that has nothing to do with the man of self-control taking an occasional drink.

And there was Mrs. Nye, a woman with some pretense to true Southern culture, who prided herself among other things on entertaining Grand Duke Alexis, of Russia, with his suite, on his visit to this country in '76. At that time she still lived in her Southern home, in North or South Carolina—I don't remember which—on a place that proved a veritable paradise for nimrods, foreign as well as domestic. She showed me with a sense of pardonable pride the autograph which the handsome prince inscribed in her album. Upon telling her that I was, myself, a countryman of the famous Russian, she deemed it her duty to give me an order, asking me to call again.

Then there was Mrs. Reynolds, since succeeded by Mr. Blick. Mrs. Reynolds was a woman of ordinary common sense, hard-working, business-like, and good-hearted. I was always sure of her patronage, though now and then she was inclined to find fault with one thing or another.

Mr. Dickman, originally a New Haven man, had settled in the South a few years prior to my travels. He was more or less of a nondescript character, and a man of impulse. As it suited his fancy, a traveling man was received favorably or otherwise. His career in Norfolk was of the shortest duration of all those parties mentioned.

Florist Emerson at Lynchburg

In Lynchburg, Va., I met a florist by the name of Emerson, and his amiable wife, both of whom proved unique. Mrs. Emerson proceeded to tell me her family history, mentioning incidents of the Civil War that were very interesting. Mr. Emerson was an actor by profession, and he played in "An American Cousin" at the time Abraham Lincoln was shot by Booth. Among others, he was arrested and locked up for a few days in Washington. Later he was released, and betook himself to his native town, where I met him. For some reason he himself could not give, he "picked up the program of the play in Lincoln's box, stained with the martyr's blood. That program was later reproduced in the Century Magazine, in the biography of Lincoln, which Nicholas and Hay wrote, about a quarter of a century ago, and which first appeared in instalments.