Demands were continually made upon Barnum’s time and his money at this period. Men with inventions visited him almost daily, offering him the opportunity to make a profit of never less than $100,000 and often as high as $1,000,000 in a remarkably short time. He was offered thousands of acres of land if he would lend his name to the sale of many more acres by stock companies, and impromptu miners offered similar inducements for the use of his notoriety. These adventurers in finance, Barnum tells us, usually began their conversations with, “Mr. Barnum, I know you are always ready to join in anything that will make money on a large scale.” Barnum’s answer usually was: “You are much mistaken in supposing that I am so ready or anxious to make money. On the contrary, there is but one thing in the world that I desire--that is, tranquillity. I am quite certain your project will not give me that, for you probably would not have called upon me if you did not wish to draw upon my brains or my purse--very likely on both. Now of the first, I have none to spare. Of the second, what I have is invested, and I have no desire to disturb it.” The schemer usually protested that his plan only required a stock company for its promotion, and that Barnum would not be bothered with details. “If you should propose to get up a stock company for converting paving stones into diamonds, with a prospect of my making a million a year, I would not join you,” Barnum tells us he always replied. When he was assailed with the glittering prospects of money to be made, he answered: “I do not want to make any money, sir; I have sufficient already to spoil my children.” But these answers did not turn away the pests. A man in Nashville, Tennessee, begged Barnum to join him in a project for a cemetery in that city, and when Barnum doubted whether people would die fast enough to make it profitable, the prospector answered, “Oh, the money is not to be made out of the necessities of the dead, but from the pride of the living.” Another man planned to carry passengers overland to California on camels, and Barnum told him he thought asses preferable, but he did not wish to be one of them. Professor Gardner, the New England soap manufacturer, wrote to Barnum: “Barnum:--I never saw you, nor you me, yet we are not strangers. You have soaped the community, and so have I. You are rich, I am not. I have a plan to add half a million to your wealth, and many laurels to your brow. I manufacture by far the best soap ever known, as a million of gentlemen, and three millions of God’s greatest work, beautiful women, will testify. I send you a sample to prove the truth of my words. Try it, and when you find that I state FACTS, put $10,000 in the soap business, join me as an equal partner, and we will thoroughly soap the American Continent in three years, at a profit of a million dollars.