The Humbugs of the World |
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Adams advertising ancient appear beautiful believe Boehmer Brandreth's Brothers Cagliostro called Cardinal cent CHAPTER coloured Company copies corsned curious Davenport Davenport Brothers devil diamonds doctor dollars edition England English ENGRAVINGS exquisite fact fellow fool France gave gentleman ghost give gold Golden Pigeons Grizzly Adams half hand handsomely haunted house heathen human humbug hundred illustrations Joanna Southcott John Camden Hotten John Herschel kind lady letters living London Louis XV Marie Antoinette medium mediumship Miscegenation morocco mysteries necklace oracle ordeal P. T. BARNUM paper party person Piccadilly pills poor pretended printed published Queen replied Rolleum sell sold sometimes soon sort South Sea South Sea Bubble spirits spiritualists story Sunday Mercury thing thousand tion told took tulip vrow whole witchcraft witches wonderful word York
Popular passages
Page 160 - A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.
Page 281 - All who eat swine's flesh are of the devil; and just as certain as he eats it, he will tell a lie in less than half an hour. If you eat a piece of pork, it will go crooked through you, and the Holy Ghost will not stay in you, but one or the other must leave the house pretty soon. The pork will be as crooked in you as rams' horns, and as great a nuisance as the hogs in the street.
Page 196 - ... life. Well might he pause! He was about to become the sole depository of wondrous secrets, which had been hid from the eyes of all men that had lived since the birth of time. He was about to crown himself with a diadem of knowledge which would give him a conscious pre-eminence above every individual of his species who then lived, or who had lived in the generations that are passed away. He paused ere he broke the seal of the casket which contained it.
Page 28 - for the last six years. Sometimes an old grizzly gave me the sermon, sometimes it was a panther ; often it was the thunder and lightning, the tempest, or the hurricane on the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, or in the gorges of the Rocky Mountains ; but whatever preached to me, it always taught me the majesty of the Creator, and revealed to me the undying and unchanging love of our kind Father in heaven. Although I am a pretty rough customer...
Page 5 - The greatest humbug of all is the man who believes— or pretends to believe— that everything and everybody are humbugs. We sometimes meet a person who professes that there is no virtue; that every man has his price, and every woman hers; that any statement from anybody is just as likely to be false as true and that the only way to decide which, is to consider whether truth or a lie was likely to have paid best in that particular case. Religion he thinks one of the smartest business dodges extant,...
Page 201 - They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short an.d glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of the shoulders to the calves of the legs.
Page 24 - I felt able to stand the hug of any grizzly living, and was always glad to encounter, single handed, any sort of an animal that dared present himself. But I have been beaten to a jelly, torn almost limb from limb, and nearly chawed up and spit out by these treacherous grizzly bears. However, I am good for a few months yet, and by that time I hope we shall gain enough to make my old woman comfortable, for I have been absent from her some years.
Page 9 - An honest man who thus arrests public attention will be called a "humbug," but he is not a swindler or an impostor. If, however, after attracting crowds of customers by his unique displays, a man foolishly fails to give them a full equivalent for their money, they never patronize him a second time, but they very properly denounce him as a swindler, a cheat, an impostor; they do not, however, call him a "humbug.