CHAPTER II.
THE CHRISTMAS WINE-HAMPER FRAUD.
Advertising pays— giving a Dinner with an object—obtaining the confidence of the public—an extraordinary bargain—a great swindle.
The tricks of "the trade" in London never fail to amuse me. When a fraud is thoroughly exploded and no longer pays, it is dropped until it is forgotten, and then revived. Solomon was quite right in saying there was nothing new. Akin to the fashions, these combinations to deceive the ever-confiding public have their apogee, their decline and fall. Like the gourd, they spring up in a single night, and never fail to secure their victims. Am I not acting the part of a public benefactor in dealing with such matters? And will not some complaisant clergyman, of the Pennington stamp, think it his duty to draw attention to the benefits to be derived from reading them? Opprobrium will be heaped on me by a certain class for speaking the truth, but I am quite prepared to figure as a martyr.
It is a melancholy fact, and I have no doubt about it, that if every one had, say £5,000 a year, crime would be banished from the land. But the millennium is not here yet, and we must take the world as we find it. It is the monetary difficulty which occasions men to whet their wits to get by fair means or foul a necessary supply of the circulating medium.
It is not everyone who can, like a certain racing nobleman, fall back on a horse to pull him through. When it got into the middle of the racing week, and Lord W—— found the bookmakers had had the best of him, he used to telegraph to his training-stable, "Send Indian Star," and that trustworthy animal almost invariably won some little race on which his lordship would plunge.
A man in the City (surely that is vague enough), not having a horse to relieve him from his monetary dilemma, was got out of the difficulty through a Christmas wine-hamper.
If what I am told be correct, his Christmas wine-hamper business was quite as legitimate as the concern known in these days as the "American Singing Bird." Not having heard the following conversation myself, you must take it as it was given to me. The scene took place in a novelty store, between the proprietor and his shopman:—
Proprietor (to shopman)—Much business this morning?
Shopman—Quiet; very quiet.
Proprietor—What! No demand for nose machines?