The Discovery of Canned Shrimps and Hesperides

To Claire, traveling men were merely commercial persons in hard-boiled
suits. She identified them with the writing-up of order-slips on long
littered writing-tables, and with hotels that reduced the delicate arts
of dining and sleeping to gray greasiness. But Milt knew traveling men.
He knew that not only were they the missionaries of business,
supplementing the taking of orders by telling merchants how to build up
trade, how to trim windows and treat customers like human beings; but
also that they, as much as the local ministers and doctors and teachers
and newspapermen, were the agents in spreading knowledge and justice. It
was they who showed the young men how to have their hair cut--and to
wash behind the ears and shave daily; they who encouraged villagers to
rise from scandal and gossip to a perception of the Great World, of
politics and sports, and some measure of art and science.

Claire, and indeed her father and Mr. Jeff Saxton as well, had vaguely
concluded that because drummers were always to be seen in soggy hotels
and badly connecting trains and the headachy waiting-rooms of stations,
they must like these places. Milt knew that the drummers were martyrs;
that for months of a trip, all the while thinking of the children back
home, they suffered from landlords and train schedules; that they were
Claire's best allies in fighting the Great American Frying Pan; that
they knew good things, and fought against the laziness and impositions
of people who "kept hotel" because they had failed as farmers; and that
when they did find a landlord who was cordial and efficient, they went
forth mightily advertising that glorious man. The traveling men, he
knew, were pioneers in spats.