"Yes, but I did such a fool thing. I addressed a card to a merchant and then turned it over and signed his name—not mine—to it. Wasn't that a fool thing to do?"
"No, not at all," I replied, laughing. "If you had sent that card to him, he would have read it. Otherwise, he will chuck the one you do send into the basket."
"Bright idea!" quoth my friend.
A few months afterward I met this same man. "Say," said he, "that was a straight tip you gave me on that advance card scheme. It worked like a charm. Half of the men I went to see had kept the cards on their desks and I had no trouble getting their ears. Some were expecting a long lost relative. When they showed me my cards with their names on them I was always amazed at such a queer mistake. There was one exception. I told one man why I did it, and he nearly threw me out of his store."
When I was told this I felt ashamed to think I had taught duplicity to an innocent. I did not know to what it might lead him.
Stolen fruits may look like they are sweet, but taste them, and they are bitter. I knew a man who sold shoes in the State of Washington. He was shrewd and sharp. He learned of an old Englishman who, although his store was in an out of the way town, did a large business. The shoeman wrote half a dozen letters to himself care of the old Englishman, addressing them as "Lord" So and So. When he reached the town the Englishman most graciously handed him the letters, and to all questions of the shoeman, who commanded a good British accent, answered, "Yes, my lord," or "No, my lord."
The shoe man explained that, like the merchant, he had hated to leave the old country, but that America—sad to state—was a more thrifty country and he had invested in a large shoe factory in Boston. He said he was merely out traveling for his health and to look over the country with a view to placing a traveling salesman on the territory. The Englishman gave him a large open order, supposing, of course, that a lord would carry no samples. The old merchant was so tickled at having a chance to buy from a lord that, notwithstanding his reserve, he one day told his dry goods man about it. This was shortly before the goods arrived.
"Why, that fellow," said the dry goods man, "is no more of a lord than I am. He is not even an Englishman." He did not know that he was "queering" a bill, for this is one thing that one traveling man will never deliberately do to another. He knows too well what a battle it is to win a bill, and he will not knowingly snatch from the victor the spoils of war.
The old Englishman returned the "lord's" goods without opening the cases.
Although the lord did not steal a base on his sharp run, I know of one instance where a shrewd traveling man sold a bill by a smart trick.