ndy, Warranted Entire (a very flagrant
distillation) filled a great part of his thoughts, and was kept before
the public in an eloquent but misleading treatise: _Why Drink French
Brandy? A Word to the Wise._ He kept an office for advertisers,
counselling, designing, acting as middleman with printers and
bill-stickers, for the inexperienced or the uninspired: the dull
haberdasher came to him for ideas, the smart theatrical agent for his
local knowledge; and one and all departed with a copy of his pamphlet:
_How, When, and Where; or, the Advertiser's Vade-Mecum._ He had a tug
chartered every Saturday afternoon and night, carried people outside the
Heads, and provided them with lines and bait for six hours' fishing,
at the rate of five dollars a person. I am told that some of
them (doubtless adroit anglers) made a profit on the transaction.
Occasionally he bought wrecks and condemned vessels; these latter (I
cannot tell you how) found their way to sea again under aliases, and
continued to stem the waves triumphantly enough under the colours of
Bolivia or Nicaragua. Lastly, there was a certain agricultural engine,
glorying in a great deal of vermilion and blue paint, and filling (it
appeared) a "long-felt want," in which his interest was something like a
tenth.

This for the face or front of his concerns. "On the outside," as he
phrased it, he was variously and mysteriously engaged. No dollar slept
in his possession; rather he kept all simultaneously flying like a
conjurer with oranges. My own earnings, when I began to have a share, he
would but show me for a moment, and disperse again, like those illusive
money gifts which are flashed in the eyes of childhood only to be
entombed in the missionary box. And he would come down radiant from a
weekly balance-sheet, clap me on the shoulder, declare himself a winner
by Gargantuan figures, and prove destitute of a quarter for a drink.

"What on earth have you done with it?" I would ask.

"Into the mill again; all re-invested!" he would cry, with infinite
delight. Investment was ever his word. He could not bear what he called
gambling. "Never touch stocks, Loudon," he would say; "nothing but
legitimate business." And yet, Heaven knows, many an indurated gambler
might have drawn back appalled at the first hint of some of Pinkerton's
investments! One, which I succeeded in tracking home, and instance for
a specimen, was a seventh share in the charter of a certain ill-starred
schoon