so _distingue_,
So let us bid him welcome,
And hope he'll find us gay.'

"The last half can be used for anybody. That's the way the improvisatory
business is managed for visitors. Why, it's the same with
fortune-telling. _You have noticed that_. Well, if the Gorgios had, it
would have been all up with the fake long ago. The old woman has the
same sort of girls come to her with the same old stories, over and over
again, and she has a hundred dodges and gets a hundred straight tips
where nobody else would see anything; and of course she has the same
replies all ready. There is nothing like being glib. And there's really
a great deal of the same in the regular doctor business, as I know,
coming close on to it and calling myself one. Why, I've been called into
a regular consultation in Chicago, where I had an office,--'pon my honor
I was, and no great honor neither. It was all patter, and I pattered 'em
dumb."

I began to think that the fakir could talk forever and ever faster. If
he excelled in his business, he evidently practiced at all times to do
so. I intimated as much, and he at once proceeded fluently to illustrate
this point also.

"You hear men say every day that if they only had an education they would
do great things. What it would all come to with most of them is that
they would _talk_ so as to shut other men up and astonish 'em. They have
not an idea above that. I never had any schooling but the roads and
race-grounds, but I can talk the hat off a lawyer, and that's all I can
do. Any man of them could talk well if he tried; but none of them will
try, and as they go through life, telling you how clever they'd have been
if somebody else had only done something for them, instead of doing
something for themselves. So you must be going. Well, I hope I shall
see you again. Just come up when you're going by and say that your wife
was raised from the dead by my Elixir, and that it's the best medicine
you ever had. And if you want to see some regular tent gypsies, there's
a camp of them now just four miles from here; real old style Romanys. Go
out on the road four miles, and you'll find them just off the
side,--anybody will show you the place. _Sarishan_!"

I was sorry to read in the newspaper, a few days after, that the fakir
had been really arrested and imprisoned for selling a quack medicine.
For in this land of liberty it makes an enormous difference whether you
sell by advertise