Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/84

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68
THE PARKWAY AND BILLY

in black-face type, ought to face a firing squad. This is the way they run:

"Where buy we sleep?" inquired the royal shirk;
The sweetest rest on earth is bought with work.

And this:

The truth of equal opportunity is this:
Life, death; love, hope and strife, no man may miss.

Or again:

When profit is won at the cost of a principle,
The winner has lost—this law is invincible.

Henry, Henry—didn't that cruise on the Oskar teach you anything? It seems too bad that Henry should go to the expense of founding a new humorous journal when Life is doing so well.

Coming back along Arch street I fell in with Billy the Bean Man. You may have seen Billy selling necklaces of white and scarlet beans on Broad street, clad in his well-known sombrero, magenta shirt and canvas trousers. Billy is a first-class medicine man, and he hits this town about once a year. He wore the cleanest shave I ever saw, but his dark William J. Bryan eyes were mournful. He tried to lure me into buying a necklace by showing me how you can walk on the beans without breaking them. "Picked and strung by the aboriginal Indians of the Staked Plain," he assured me; "and brought by me to this home of eastern culture. A sovereign remedy for seasickness and gout."

"Billy," I said, "you amaze me. Last year