The Backslider

The Backslider
By George Ade
THE story came from the victim himself. He offered it, not as an exposition of wondrous facts encircled by holly and mistletoe, but merely as an instance of sure-enough bard luck.
The man who told it had been a law-breaker in most of the States of the Mississippi Valley in which laws were being broken at the time he happened along. He dealt largely in games of chance, with the element of chance removed. At the old settlers' reunion he toiled carelessly above a folding-table—really a sewing-table, given as a premium by the fashion magazine for one new subscriber. The properties were three halves of the common English walnut and a very small sphere of soft rubber. At the district fair he sold buggy-whips and bought them back at increased prices, and then sold other whips and did not buy them back, involving himself in a series of complicated transactions which left the purchasers bewildered, as the livery rig disappeared up the pike.
Chicago was headquarters for the practitioners of graft long before the word got into politics and began to symbolize a cheaper form of indirect larceny. The lean years came after the close of the Columbian Exposition, the

Đọc bản gốc tại Wikisource tiếng Anh