The price he said was $1.00, and he would run the risk, if we would come around just before the boat started and then promise, all of us, not to open the package until the boat had left the dock. To this we readily agreed and then went on taking in the town, thinking more about the book than we did about the giants, pygmies, monkeys and elephants which we found at Barnum's Museum.
We were now hungry again, so we took another oyster stew and then started up the Bowery, when we heard music and were invited in where a wheel table was turning. One could put down ten cents and might win $100.00. We were going shares in everything, so decided to risk ten cents, and the other boys allowed me to try. "Forty dollars," cried the man, and then discovered his mistake, that it was only forty cents, and then began telling of folks from the country winning money, and this was one of the stories which did not take:
"A large man," he said, "came to New York from the mountains of Pennsylvania and offered to bet $50.00 that he could carry a feather-bed tick full of buckshot across Broadway on his head. Well, boys, we loaded the tick, which took nearly all the shot in the city, and he started. He won the bet, I saw him do it, but you see that stone pavement on Broadway, do you? Well, boys, when he crossed the street the load was so heavy that he mired into that stone pavement clear up to his knees, but he won the $50.00."
Then we told him that we were liars ourselves, and trudged on, actually having beat the gamblers out of thirty cents.
After another oyster stew dinner we strolled into the Bowery Theatre, where minstrels were playing, which amused us, as it was the first we had ever seen, and supposed they were genuine darkies. They sat in a half circle and after singing and playing, the two end men would ask questions, and one dialogue ran this way:
"Rastus, I heard you was out last night."
"Yes, Sah, I was out prominading on Broadway."
"Did you have your best girl along?"