300 
agents, and when parties cannot tell the ring of the 
genuine metal when it approaches him in the form of a 
tree vendor they had better send their orders direct to 
some responsible house doing business in that line, and 
they may be assured full justice will be meted out to 
them and satisfaction assured. It is only by such acts 
as this that reputable houses can exist and can control 
the large business that they do without the aid of ped- 
lars, plate books, or preserved specimens of fruit, all of 
which are misleading to the uninitiated. So far as the 
florist business is concerned there is no first-class florist 
that sends out a drummer in this country. They all 
spend on their catalogues the money spent on drummers 
in all the other commercial pursuits. The intelligent 
business men in all the cities of the South, both the 
prosperous merchants, the shrewd lawyers, the calculat- 
ing insurance man, the far seeing preacher and investi- 
gating doctors are all elert, and it takes a clever man 
indeed to catch them on any wiles of city life. They are 
familiar with the approach of the bunco steerer and the 
interesting story of the confidence men. They have 
listened to the concert of the patent medicene men on 
the public squares of their city, but they never buy. 
They know all about the auctioneer on their market 
squares that shouts himself hoarse offering gold watches 
for $5.00 a piece, they will let him carefully alone, al- — 
though they are aware that they could not get a gold 
watch any cheaper. The tears of a benighted orphan 
in search of a parent, and the grief of a heavily veiled 
woman on the street availeth them nothing, they are 
long familiar with all these and a thousand other tricks 
that is practiced in large cities. From their knowlege of 
all these things their repetition does not arouse their 
cupidity or elicit over a smile of derision. But when 
