Absent-mindedly I read an advertisement in small
type, spelling it over idly while I was trying to think what to do
next.
"Wanted," it read, "by the Myers Manufacturing Company, agents to
sell a patent flat and fluting iron. Samples 75 cents."
The address was somewhere in John Street, New York. Samples
seventy-five cents! I repeated it mechanically. Why, that was just
the size of my pile. And right in my line of canvassing, too!
In ten minutes it was on the way to New York and I had secured
a provisional customer in the cook at the restaurant for an iron
that would perform what this one promised, iron the skirt and flute
the flounce too. In three days the iron came and proved good. I
started in canvassing Jamestown with it, and in a week had secured
orders for one hundred and twenty, upon which my profit would be
over $80. Something of business ways must have stuck to me, after
all, from my one excursion into the realm of trade; for when it
came to delivering the goods and I had no money, I went boldly to
a business man whose wife was on my books, and offered, if he would
send for the irons, to pay for them as I took them out of the store.
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