To the Metropolitan Guide Publishing Co.,
New York.
Gentlemen.--I received the copy of your justly celebrated "Guide to
Rapid Affluence, or How to Acquire Wealth Without Mental Exertion,"
price twenty-five cents. It is a great boon.
I have now had this book sixteen weeks, and, as I am wealthy enough, I
return it. It is not much worn, and if you will allow me fifteen cents
for it, I would be very grateful. It is not the intrinsic value of
the fifteen cents that I care for so much, but I would like it as a
curiosity.
The book is wonderfully graphic and thorough in its details, and I was
especially pleased with its careful and useful recipe for ointments. One
style of ointment spoken of and recommended by your valuable book,
is worthy of a place in history. I made some of it according to your
formula. I tried it on a friend of mine. He wore it when he went away,
and he has not as yet returned. I heard, incidentally, that it adhered
to him. People who have examined it say that it retains its position on
his person similar to a birthmark.
Your cement does not have the same peculiarity. It does everything but
adhere. Among other specialties it affects a singular odor. It has a
fragrance that ought to be utilized in some way. Men have harnessed the
lightning, and it seems to me that the day is not far distant when a man
will be raised up who can control this latent power. Do you not think
that possibly you have made a mistake and got your ointment and
cement formula mixed? Your cement certainly smells like a corrupt
administration in a warm room.
Your revelations in the liquor manufacture, and how to make any mixed
drink with one hand tied, is well worth the price of the book. The
chapter on bar etiquette is also excellent.
Very few men know how to properly enter a bar-room and what to do after
they arrive. How to get into a bar-room without attracting attention,
and how to get out without police interference are points upon which our
American drunkards are lamentably ignorant.
How to properly address a bar tender, is also a page that no student of
good breeding could well omit.
I was greatly surprised to read how simple the manufacture of drinks
under your formula is. You construct a cocktail without liquor and then
rob intemperance of its sting. You also make all kinds of liquor without
the use of alcohol, that demon under whose iron heel thousands of our
sons and brothers go down to death and delirium annually. Thus you are
doing a good work.
You also unite aloes, tobacco and Rough on Rats, and, by a happy
combination, construct a style of beer that is non-intoxicating.
No one could, by any possible means, become intoxicated on your justly
celebrated beer. He would not have time. Before he could get inebriated
he would be in the New Jerusalem.
Those who drink your beer will not fill drunkards' graves. They will
close their career and march out of this life with perforated stomachs
and a look of intense anguish.
Your method of making cider without apples is also frugal and ingenious.
Thousands of innocent apple worms annually lose their lives in
the manufacture of cider. They are also, in most instances, wholly
unprepared to die. By your method, a style of wormless cider is
constructed that would not fool anyone. It tastes a good deal like rain
water that was rained about the first time that any raining was ever
done, and was deprived of air ever since.
[Illustration: 0213]
The closing chapter on the subject of "How to win the affections of
the opposite sex at sixty yards," is first-rate. It is wonderful what
triumph science and inventions have wrenched from obdurate conditions!
Only a few years ago, a young man had to work hard for weeks and months
in order to win the love of a noble young woman. Now, with your valuable
and scholarly work, price twenty-five cents, he studies over the closing
chapter an hour or two, then goes out into society and gathers in his
victim. And yet I do not grudge the long, long hours I squandered in
those years when people were in heathenish darkness. I had no book like
yours to tell me how to win the affections of the opposite sex. I could
only blunder on, week after week, and yet I do not regret it. It was
just the school I needed. It did me good.
Your book will, no doubt, be a good thing for those who now grope, but
I have groped so long that I have formed the habit and prefer it. Let
me go right on groping. Those who desire to win the affections of the
opposite sex at one sitting, will do well to send two bits for your
great work, but I am in no hurry. My time is not valuable.