most delicately adapted to make Master Bumpkin feel
certain that his cash is coming. He says, "Be sure to show your prize to
all your friends, so as to make them buy tickets at my office."

Moreover, these letters inclose each a "report of the seventeenth
monthly drawing of the Cosmopolitan Art Union Association." You may
observe that one of these "seventeenth drawings" took place November 7
1864, and another December 5, 1864; so that seventeenthly came twice.
What is a far more remarkable coincidence is this; that in each of these
"reports" is a list of a hundred and thirty or forty numbers that drew
prizes, and it is exactly the same list each time, and the same prize
to each number! There is a third coincidence; that one of these two
drawings is said to have been at London, New York, and the other at
London, New Jersey. And lastly, there is a fourth coincidence, viz.,
that neither of these places exists.

Now, what a transparent swindle this is! how plain, how impudent, how
rascally! And all done entirely by the use of the Post Office privileges
of the United States. Try to catch this fellow. You can find where he
mailed his circular; but he probably stopped there over night to do so,
and nobody knew it. In each circular, he wrote to his dupes to address
him at that new "more central location" that he struggles after so hard;
and how is the pursuer to find it? Would anybody naturally go and watch
the Post Office at Bronxville, New York, for instance, as a particularly
central location for business?

Besides, no one person is cheated out of enough to make him follow up
the affair, and probably nobody who sends the cash wants to say much
about it afterward. He wants to wait and show the prize!

These dirty sharking traps will always be set, and will always catch
silly people, as long as there are any to catch. The only means of
stopping such trickery is to diffuse the conviction that the best way to
get a living is, to go to work like a man and earn it honestly.

CHAPTER XXII.

ANOTHER LOTTERY HUMBUG.--TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY RECIPES.--VILE
BOOKS.--"ADVANTAGE-CARDS."--A PACKAGE FOR YOU; PLEASE SEND THE
MONEY.--PEDDLING IN WESTERN NEW YORK.

The readiness with which people will send off their money to a swindler
is perfectly astounding. It does really seem as if an independent
fortune could be made simply by putting forth circulars and
advertisements, requesting the receiver to send five dollars to the
ad