After a little conversation, an idea struck me, which I immediately carried into effect. I made my arrangements with the manager for himself and the six female members of the company, giving the gentleman enough money to get out of town. I rented a large hall, and opened it up as an original museum. We put the six ladies on exhibition as the principal and, in fact, the only attraction, advertising them as six beautiful widows in search of husbands. Each exhibition was interspersed with little orations, in which we gave the ages and pedigrees of the different ladies, together with the amount of cash each one had in her own right. Every eligible single gentleman was entitled to registration by name or number—or by both—as a candidate for the hand of the lady he might select, and we started in with the number something like 22,911. The choice of the lady was to be made at the end of the season. The widows looked very charming in their fancy full dress costumes, and did several dignified “turns” in singing and legitimate theatricals, proving a great drawing card, with the sterner sex. For a while the dimes and quarters came rolling in pretty fast, but eventually the novelty began to wear off and the audiences thinned out, so that I decided to shift my field of operations. My expenses had really been heavier than I knew. The manager gambled and lost a great deal of our capital; the various widows had divided up into pairs, each jealous of the others. The brightest lady of the troupe fell sick of a fever, the most beautiful one eloped with a worthless actor, one was really married to a planter residing in the neighborhood of Marshall, who bravely followed her up and cut her out from under my very nose, and two more “silently stole away” the very night of the walking of the ghost, leaving me with just a remnant of one charming widow on my hands. Fearful lest I might be led into the only apparently legitimate outcome, that of marrying the unexpended balance, I left that lady the entire remnant of my fortune, amounting in all to about forty dollars, only reserving enough to get me out of town, and then ran away myself. It had taken about four months to find out that, though my ideas might be both original and good, I was not cut out for a successful museum manager. I quit the business a sadder and wiser man. At that time the business of securing “free transportation” had not been brought down to the present fine point. Perhaps one reason was that most any person with a plausible excuse and the gall to apply could secure a pass from New Orleans to Halifax. In my hours of prosperity, of course, I paid my fare over the railroads, the same as any other millionaire; when stranded I only walked when it was impossible to ride.