The sole difference between professional borrowers and beggars is, that the former always promise to pay, and the latter never promise, though one can be as much depended upon for settlement as the other.
CONSTANT CALAMITIES.
Such recurring calamities as visit these unblushing negotiators of loans might have been gathered from the multitudinous woes of the Greek tragedies or the grand operas. The borrowers are very seldom unprovided with a dead mother, or an unburied wife, or starving children, or a dishonest partner, or a stolen pocket-book, or a deferred remittance, or an absolutely necessary journey, or a remarkable mishap of some sort. They infest the principal hotels at the busy hours of the day, and employ their best energies in introducing themselves to the pockets of the boarders. Nearly every public house appears to have its special haunters, and one ingenious story will serve their purpose for a month or more. Borrowing has long been systematized here, and every season is marked by new inventions and pathetic fictions to delude the generous and unwary.
The audacity of the professional borrower is grand and exalted. He will stop your carriage in the park, and invite you to a pecuniary desperation; will make known his financial embarrassment as you are walking out of church with the present or future Mrs. —— on your arm; seek a private interview, with a monetary purpose, before you are up in the morning.
If you were to be hanged,—of which there is no danger in New York, whatever crime you may commit,—he would steal up behind the sheriff, as the latter was drawing the black cap over your eyes, and ask you if you could not spare ten dollars, now that you were going to a country where national bank-notes are not current.
Most New Yorkers understand so thoroughly the trick of courteous cozening, that, whenever any man they do not know intimately seems anxious to see them, they are convinced that he is in quest of a loan, and in nineteen cases out of twenty their convictions are just. Neither friendship, nor love, nor detectives can trace a fellow to his lair, or scent out his sanctuary, like a borrower. He will pursue his game round the world, and shame a sleuth-hound from the start.
AT THE END.
“Lost in the great city” is often a sad truth; but it may be converted into a fiction if a man in need of money have his attention called to the pocket-book of the person supposed to be lost. You cannot so bury yourself in this Babylon of a new world that the borrower will not bring you to light. And, if you have had experience, when a stranger flatters you, you will understand, from the degree of his compliment, the exact amount of the loan he expects to obtain.