Rather, what have I not done along the lines of a fakir’s avocation? I believe at various times I have handled everything sold on the road. In giving you the arguments and methods employed in my different canvasses I have drawn solely from actual experience and observation, and endeavored as explicitly as possible to show how I overcame every obstacle and objection, and attained a flattering degree of success.
For obvious reasons, an accredited fakir would stand no show in running for public office; but he runs for everything else in sight, and allows the public offices to take care of themselves. In general, he is a happy-go-lucky chap, who sleeps with one eye open, and dreams of 200 per cent. profits. He is a solid, windy bluff; an unscrupulous, honest trader; a rollicking, sober fellow; a truthful prevaricator; a generous absorber of money; a free dispenser of advice; a necessary adjunct to a circus, and not always thrown away at a church fair. He is the profitable terror of the hotel proprietor, the mash of the same proprietor’s daughters, and the life of a friendly game of draw; always ready to shovel snow in July, or mow a blue grass lawn in January, if he can, as he certainly will, make his account out of such occupation. To summarize, he is a bundle of contradictions—easy, yet hard to understand; overflowing with the milk of human kindness, but professionally hard as rocks. In the way of business, no game is too high or too low for him to fly at or swoop down upon.
The life of a fakir is not easy sailing. He strikes many a stumbling block along the road, and is hampered by many a disadvantage. He can have no continuous abiding place. He must move with the tide, and shift his operations from day to day. The business of this week will be the reminiscence of next. New fields, new customers, new fakes; for these he must be constantly on the alert, and work them to the most extreme limit. While on the road he is practically a citizen without a country and a man without a home.
This book is not launched upon the sea of public approval as a literary gem. It is merely an expose of the tricks and triumphs of twenty years of successful faking, and as such, without more words of explanation, allow me to present it.
The Author.
CHAPTER I.
STARTING OUT.
Becoming Ambitious—Leaving Home—Hotel Porter—Card Business—Lightning Rod Agent—The Accident—Twelve Glasses of Water.
I was born in the good old State of Illinois, my birthplace being on a farm just twenty miles out of Chicago. Here I lived until I was eighteen years of age. My father was fairly well fixed as a farmer and gave me as good an education, both classical and musical, as a country residence could afford. In those early days of my life the western half of the United States was virtually in its infancy, and all around me, in whatever direction the eye might turn, new enterprises were being launched with a view to development of the country. Reading of these created a desire on my part to see some of them, and perhaps take my humble part in the great work of building up the new side of the nation.