s failing, their wives would cast them bodily into the
holds of their ships and start them out to sea, where they soon
recovered their usual health and equilibrium and continued on their
rounds. They were the first of all commercial travelers and the
hardiest, jolliest and most prosperous--but they did not hoard their
earnings.

My uncle conducted a store, selling merchandise of every description.
Dutch uncle though he was to me, I must give him thanks for the careful
business training he bestowed on me. I say with pride that I proved to
be his most apt and willing pupil. He taught me how the natives, by
nature simple-minded and unsophisticated, had lost all confidence in
their fellow-men in general and merchants in particular through the, to
say the least, very dubious and suspicious dealings of the tribes of
Israel. My uncle said he was an old timer in New Mexico, but the Jew
was there already when he came and, added he, thoughtfully, "I believe
the Jews came to America with Columbus." With a pack of merchandise
strapped to his back, this king of commerce crossed the plains in the
face of murderous Indians and with the unexplainable, crafty cunning of
his race, he sold tobacco and trinkets to the warriors who had set out
to kill him, and to the squaws he sold Parisian lingerie at a bargain.
He swore that he was losing money and selling the goods below cost, not
counting the freight.

As the Indians had no money and nothing else of commercial value to
him, he bartered for the trophies of victory which the proud chiefs
carried suspended from their belts. Deprecatingly he called their
attention to the undeniable fact that these articles had been worn
before and had to be rated as second-hand goods. But he hoped that his
brother-in-law, Isaac Dreibein, who conducted a second-hand
hairdressing establishment in New York City, would take these goods off
his hands. This trade flourished for a time, until, as usual, Israel
fell off from the Lord, by opening shop on the Sabbath. An unlucky
Moses got into a fatal altercation with a Comanche chief, whom he
cheated out of a scalplock, as he was as baldheaded as a hen's egg.
Thereat the Indians became suspicious and refused to trade with the
Jews ever after.

With proverbial German thoroughness, uncle instructed me in all the
tricks and secrets of his profession. He had found that the Mexicans
were good buyers, if handled scientifically, for they would never leave
the store unt