Here it is.
I had thirty callers. Of those, how many do you suppose
came to see me on my own business? Just eight. That is
to say, their errands were about investments of mine,
but most of them managed to get in some word about axes
of their own to grind. All the rest made no pretence
at all of thinking about anybody but themselves.
I've classified them, one by one, here.
"First, there were six men who wanted me to take shares
of one sort or another, and I had to more or less listen
to what they tried to make out their companies were like.
They were none of them any good. Eight different
fellows came to me with schemes that haven't reached the
company stage. One had a scheme for getting possession
of a nigger republic in the West Indies by raising
a loan, and then repudiating all the previous loans.
Another wanted me to buy a paper for him, in which he was
to support all my enterprises. Another wanted to start
a bank--I apparently to find the money, and he the brains.
One chap wanted me to finance a theatrical syndicate--he
had a bag full of photographs of an actress all eyes
and teeth and hair,--and another chap had a scheme all
worked out for getting a concession from Spain for one
of the Caroline Islands, and putting up a factory there
for making porpoise-hide leather.
"Then there were three inventors--let's see, here they
are--one with a coiled wire spring for scissors inside
a pocket-knife, and one with a bottle, the whole top
of which unscrews instead of having a cork or stopper,
and one with an electrical fish-line, a fine wire inside
the silk, you know, which connects with some battery
when a fish bites, and rings a bell, and throws out hooks
in various directions, and does all sorts of things.
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