FullReads

I remember an old “Joke” told me by my father, of an old, and rather addle-headed gentleman, who some fifty years ago did business in New Castle, Delaware, and having occasion to send out to England for hardware, wrote his order, and as he was about to despatch it to the captain of the ship, lying in the stream, ready for sea, a neighbor got him to add an order for some kegs of nails, and in the hurry, the old man dashed off his P. S., but upon attempting to read the whole order over, he couldn’t make head or tail of it.

“Well,” says he, in a flurry, “I’ll send it, just as it is; they are better scholars in England than I am– they’ll make it out.”

Strange enough to say, when the hardware came over, among the rest of the stuff were the so many kegs of nails, but upon opening one of these kegs, it was full, or nearly so, of American quarter dollars. The old man roared out in a [word missing].

“Haw! haw! haw! Well, blast me,” says he, “if they ain’t scholars, fust-rate scholars, in England; it’s worth while sending ’em bad manuscript.”

A still more comical mistake is related to us, of a commercial transaction that actually took place within a year or two, between parties severally situated in Boston and the city of San Francisco, California. As we consider the whole transaction rather rich, we transcribe it for the diversion it may furnish.

Simmons, the “Oak Hall” man, of Boston, had set up a shop in San Francisco, to which he was almost daily sending all sorts of cheap clothing, and making, on the same, more money than a horse could pull; and in his package, he was in the habit of sending articles for friends, etc. A gentleman recently gone to the gold country, from Boston, acquainted with Simmons, and Simmons with him, found, upon looking around San Francisco, that his own business, lawing, wasn’t worth two cents, as many of his craft were turning their attention to matters more useful to the human family–digging cellars, wheeling baggage, driving teams, etc. So lawyer Bunker turned his attention from Blackstone, Chitty, Coke on Littleton, and those fellows of deep-red, blue-black law, to the manufacture of quack nostrums. Bunker found that the great appetite we Yankees have for quack medicines, pills and powders, suffered no diminution in the gold country; on the contrary, the appetite became rather sharpened for those luxuries, and Bunker found that a New York butcher, with whom he became acquainted, was absolutely making his fortune, by the manufacture of dough pills, spiced with coriander, and a slight tincture of calomel.

“Egad!” says Bunker, ” I’ll go into medicine. I’ll write to a friend in Boston, to send me out a few medicine and receipt books, and a lot of pulverized liquorice, quinine, etc., with a pill machine, and I guess I’ll be after my New York butchering friend in a double brace of shakes.”

Now, it may be premised that as Bunker was a lawyer, he wrote a first-rate hand; in fact, he might have bragged of being able to equal, if not surpass, the “Hon.” Rufus Choate, whose scrawl more resembles the scratchings of a poor half-drowned in an ink-saucer spider, meandering over foolscap, than quill-driving, and as unintelligible as the marks of a tea-box or hieroglyphics on the sarcophagus of ye ancient Egyptians! In short, Counsellor Bunker’s manuscript was awful; a few of his most intimate friends, only, pretending to have the hang of it at all; and to one of these friends, Bunker directs his message, transmits it by Uncle Sam’s mail poche, and in fever heat he awaits the return of the precious combustibles that were to make his fortune. In course of time, Bunker’s friends receive the order, but, alas! it was all Greek to them; they cyphered in vain, to make out any thing in the letters except persimmons.