But I'm ready to begin; and the members of
Willie Manhattan's Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to
contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation, may as well
send their photos to the _Evening Daily_.
"I've been studying the town," says Silver, "and reading the papers
every day, and I know it as well as the cat in the City Hall knows an
O'Sullivan. People here lie down on the floor and scream and kick when
you are the least bit slow about taking money from them. Come up in my
room and I'll tell you. We'll work the town together, Billy, for the
sake of old times."
Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a quantity of irrelevant objects
lying about.
"There's more ways of getting money from these metropolitan hayseeds,"
says Silver, "than there is of cooking rice in Charleston, S. C. They'll
bite at anything. The brains of most of 'em commute. The wiser they are
in intelligence the less perception of cognizance they have. Why, didn't
a man the other day sell J. P. Morgan an oil portrait of Rockefeller,
Jr., for Andrea del Sarto's celebrated painting of the young Saint John!
"You see that bundle of printed stuff in the corner, Billy? That's gold
mining stock.
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