CHAPTER VII.
The Museum Scheme and the Six Widows—Traveling Without Paying Railroad Fare—Living on Free Lunches—At a Low Ebb—The Animated Chocolate Drop—Old Auntie From Smoky Row—The Corn Doctor—The Excited Mob—Not Only Broke, But Dead-Broke—The Letter From Home—Getting Out of Town.
Of course, it would take up too much time to tell of all my wanderings and my numerous ups and downs. My idea is not to give more than one experience with any particular line of business, and in that show just how I worked, and indicate about what was my percentage of profit.
I worked off the stock of goods sent me C. O. D. by my friend, the professor, bought a number of other stocks on my own account, and covered considerable territory. If my success was great, however, my personal expenses were large. I was not naturally an extravagant man, had not very well remembered the lessons of economy, and wealth did not accumulate in my hands as rapidly as the reader might suppose.
One morning I woke up with nothing special on my hands, and just three hundred dollars in my pockets. Impelled by what was probably a whim to start in some permanent business, I went to the town of Marshall, Georgia, on a prospecting tour. I saw no opening there which impressed me favorably, until, while I was waiting undecided what to do, I met the manager of a theatrical company which had just stranded in a neighboring city.
After a little conversation, an idea struck me, which I immediately carried into effect. I made my arrangements with the manager for himself and the six female members of the company, giving the gentleman enough money to get out of town. I rented a large hall, and opened it up as an original museum. We put the six ladies on exhibition as the principal and, in fact, the only attraction, advertising them as six beautiful widows in search of husbands.
Each exhibition was interspersed with little orations, in which we gave the ages and pedigrees of the different ladies, together with the amount of cash each one had in her own right. Every eligible single gentleman was entitled to registration by name or number—or by both—as a candidate for the hand of the lady he might select, and we started in with the number something like 22,911. The choice of the lady was to be made at the end of the season.
The widows looked very charming in their fancy full dress costumes, and did several dignified “turns” in singing and legitimate theatricals, proving a great drawing card, with the sterner sex. For a while the dimes and quarters came rolling in pretty fast, but eventually the novelty began to wear off and the audiences thinned out, so that I decided to shift my field of operations. My expenses had really been heavier than I knew. The manager gambled and lost a great deal of our capital; the various widows had divided up into pairs, each jealous of the others. The brightest lady of the troupe fell sick of a fever, the most beautiful one eloped with a worthless actor, one was really married to a planter residing in the neighborhood of Marshall, who bravely followed her up and cut her out from under my very nose, and two more “silently stole away” the very night of the walking of the ghost, leaving me with just a remnant of one charming widow on my hands.
Fearful lest I might be led into the only apparently legitimate outcome, that of marrying the unexpended balance, I left that lady the entire remnant of my fortune, amounting in all to about forty dollars, only reserving enough to get me out of town, and then ran away myself. It had taken about four months to find out that, though my ideas might be both original and good, I was not cut out for a successful museum manager. I quit the business a sadder and wiser man.