Year: 1874

The mulberry sellers OF society--A True


r .. Picture. .. . '-


Of the tribe of Sellers, says the Iri-
bune. there are many families, but the
two great divisions. are, perhaps, the
honest and the dishonest. The honest
Mulberry keeps himself, as well as
every one around him, in perpetual
poverty. He is always on the point of
making fortune too huge for the use
of one man, colonel though he be, and
he announces his intention of sharing


it with you; /; as preliminary step he
induces you to indorse his note or to
lend him the little store you had laid
up against a rainy day, and shoots it
into the hopper of his enterprise. You
are ruined, and his eve still beams upon
you with disinterested affection and
unabated hope. He believes every
word he says. His sincerity is cock
tensive with his imagination, and the
more gigantic his castles in the air the
moro profound his conviction that he
is the owner of them all in fee. simple.
The honest Mulberry went into oil, and
was ruined went into stocks, and was
ruined again went into real estate,
and came out poorer than before; went
into railroad bonds, and emerged
bankrupt, though no one could see
what there was left to go to smash.
And every time he comes up smiling,
with the light of a new " corner" or
"strike sparkling in his eye. He is
genuine Micawber howered on Ameri-
can soil, but greater than Mioawber,
for he is invincible. He is too Ameri-
can for despair !; he steps up promptly
to each new round with fate-and gets
thro wn every time. a. .r. -


The dishonest. Mulberry is less
pleasing fellow. He makes q precari-
GUS and disreputable living by the ex-
penditure of ingenuity and industry
which honestly exerted would make
him millionaire-if his name was
anything but Sellers. His schemes are
no less stupendous than those of the
more scrupulous Mulberry, but they
are all aimed at the appropriation Of
somebody else's money or thoughts or
labor. He is civilized robber, and is
invariably captured. He plots rail
road swindle, and the reporters pry it
out with their pencils he worms him
self into the confidence of defrauded
bondholders, and is speedily dis
charged he publishes poem, and
next day sees the original and his
plagiarism printed in parallel columns;
he secretly infringes upon o patent, and
1s at once served with papers in o suit
for damages; he commits forgery,
and is detected by the first cashier he
approaches. The curse of ill-luck
withers every speech and action of his
life, and yet he goes on to the end of
his days the same undaunted, rascally
Mulberry Sellers.


At Washington, Mulberry Sellers is
ubiquitous and influential. He has
held score of seats in every Congress
within the memory of man, while in the
lobby he is always in majority. Null
berry, the lobbyist, lives a gilded, hol-
low sort of life, dining sumptuously
during the session and starving during
the recess. His bill fails of passage
Tor want Of three minutes time on the
morning of the fourth of March, and
is knocked on the head by the blow of
the Speakers mallet which declares the
Congress ended or his project is re-
ferred to committee whose chairman,
he finds to his disgust, is virtuous. He
1naugurates Pacific railroads and lays
the foundations for vast fortunes on
which others build. He takes a hand
at President-making, and his candidate
suffers g pa-slytic stroke the week be-
fore the convention. Mulberry, the
Member, fails to get the appropriation
his constituents wanted, and those
kindly souls burn him in effigy, and in
innate their purpose of running him
out of the country if he should ever
return to it.


Many man is Mulberry Sellers
who would be astounded if you dubbed
him SO. Superficial men who never
learn or do or say anything thoroughly
immethodical men who lack the system
and fidelity that make success incon-
stant men who abandon one purpose as
soon as their quick brains conceive an.
other, and accomplish none of them
foolish fellows who think that real sue
cess is thing to be stolen or bought
or snatched out of the hand of fate
these are representative Americans and
representative Of much that is raw and
worthless IN our civilization. The
moral of Mulberry Sellers is good,
whatever his morals may be.