Sam was no exception to this rule. With all his endeavors to run the thing ship-shape, his mode of proceeding was questioned by one of the linemen, in a note which I reproduce verbatim:

New York, April, 1873.

Mr. Samuil Bogert: It is my duty to inform you that you are placed in a very trust-worthy position in this great office where I can say that the news of the world passes to and fro but friend bogert you may thank your good conduct and intalagance to be in the great position where you now stand but friend bogert it is my painfull duty to say to you now that you maid a great mistake some time past you sent me on 10 West for cross between 145 Broadway and 30th Street putting my hole confidence in the chief operators for nature of fault and location which I find them mos correct friend bogert I started on 10 West looking for a cross straining every nerve in my hole sistom and to my great surpris I found it laying against the side of a Hous in Canal street friend bogert you should have a care for your own sake and mine very well I shust say shurely a child must creep before it can walk for your time you are doweing well you are a credit to the land that gave you berth you can sit on your stool and converse with your fellow man in every part of the world and the continent of Aurope, the same as face to face friend bogert you ought to be very carefull in your movements you are watched by your chief, by the manager of this great office down to the linemen and humble tom finegan that picks the scraps of paper from your feet so friend bogert I will conclude by saying good-by for the present.

I remain your friend

The other day a fashionably dressed young man, wearing a cane and sporting a bright nosegay in the button-hole of his glossy Prince Albert coat, stepped into Gaylord’s drug store at Maguffinsville, and approaching the clerk, began in a pleasant way:

“What have you got for a spring medicine—something for the blood, you know?”

The accommodating clerk suggested a preparation of sarsaparilla as about as valuable as anything, and handed down a bottle of that compound. After inquiring the price the young man read the label and directions with great care, and handing it back, said:

“Show me something better than that; something sort of—I don’t mind the price so much.”

So the corteous clerk got down a preparation of Buchu at two dollars a bottle, another of iron and cod liver oil at three dollars a bottle, and so on until the top of the show case was strewn with panaceas for all the ills that flesh is heir to, ranging in price from one dollar to ten. He had just been descanting on the virtues of a four-dollar medicine which he had warmly recommended as “a mild and delightful aperient,” when his patron turned lightly on his heels, twirled his cane and his mustache alternately, for a moment, cast his beaming eye over the contents of the teeming shelves, and then humming a bar or two from “Rigoletto,” he came to right-about face once more and said:

“Well, business is business; say, old man, gimme three cents’ worth of Epsom salts.”

In books and dramas the wrong doers are ultimately defeated and thrown cowering into the street, or permitted to slink away to be lost forever to mortal gaze, while the virtuous invariably disport them at rosy lipped cherubim, and are frequently suspended aloft in an impossible bower of flowers, and red fire heightens the general whole. But in real life, alas! virtue and right step along the rough thoroughfare of human events like ordinary creatures, and vice and deceit often outstrip them in the world’s regard. Satan generally holds just as good cards as the angels, and turns his share of trumps with annoying regularity, and sometimes with a facility most perplexing and inexplicable. The following preface is of sufficient merit, I trust, to introduce even as merry and fun loving a genius as my friend David Twist, who is an operator in a hotel office in an adjacent city. Among David’s patrons is a wealthy and eccentric old gentleman who rides his hobbies to suit his fancy, with no one to say to him nay. One of his later whims was a desire to learn telegraphy. To facilitate his wishes in that regard, a wire was suspended at