Sharp Dealing

An episode from P.T. Barnum’s childhood in Bethel, Connecticut:

‘What is the price of razor strops?’ inquired my grandfather of a peddler, whose wagon, loaded with Yankee notions, stood in front of our store.

‘A dollar each for Pomeroy’s strops,’ responded the itinerant merchant.

‘A dollar apiece!’ exclaimed my grandfather; ‘they’ll be sold for half the money before the year is out.’

‘If one of Pomeroy’s strops is sold for fifty cents within a year, I’ll make you a present of one,’ replied the peddler.

‘I’ll purchase one on those conditions. Now, Ben, I call you to witness the contract,’ said my grandfather, addressing himself to Esquire Hoyt.

‘All right,’ responded Ben.

‘Yes,’ said the peddler, ‘I’ll do as I say, and there’s no backout to me.’

My grandfather took the strop, and put it in his side coat pocket.

Presently drawing it out, and turning to Esquire Hoyt, he said, ‘Ben, I don’t much like this strop now I have bought it. How much will you give for it?’

‘Well, I guess, seeing it’s you, I’ll give fifty cents,’ drawled the ‘Squire, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, which said that the strop and the peddler were both incontinently sold.

‘You can take it. I guess I’ll get along with my old one a spell longer,’ said my grandfather, giving the peddler a knowing look.

The strop changed hands, and the peddler exclaimed, ‘I acknowledge, gentlemen; what’s to pay?’

‘Treat the company, and confess you are taken in, or else give me a strop,’ replied my grandfather.

‘I never will confess nor treat,’ said the peddler, ‘but I’ll give you a strop for your wit;’ and suiting the action to the word, he handed a second strop to his customer. A hearty laugh ensued, in which the peddler joined.

‘Some pretty sharp fellows here in Bethel,’ said a bystander, addressing the peddler.

‘Tolerable, but nothing to brag of,’ replied the peddler; ‘I have made seventy-five cents by the operation.’

‘How is that?’ was the inquiry.

‘I have received a dollar for two strops which cost me only twelve and a half cents each,’ replied the peddler; ‘but having heard of the cute tricks of the Bethel chaps, I thought I would look out for them and fix my prices accordingly. I generally sell these strops at twenty-five cents each, but, gentlemen, if you want any more at fifty cents apiece, I shall be happy to supply your whole village.’

Our neighbors laughed out of the other side of their mouths, but no more strops were purchased.

(From his 1855 autobiography.)

| Society

Coming and Going

If Socrates was born, Socrates became either when Socrates existed not or when Socrates already existed; but if he shall be said to have become when he already existed, he will have become twice; and if when he did not exist, Socrates was both existent and non-existent at the same time — existent through having become, non-existent by hypothesis. And if Socrates died, he died either when he lived or when he died. Now he did not die when he lived, since he would have been at once both alive and dead; nor yet when he died, since he would have been dead twice. Therefore Socrates did not die. And by applying this argument in turn to each of the things said to become or perish it is possible to abolish becoming and perishing.

— Sextus Empiricus

| Oddities

Going Up

A puzzle by Virginia McCarthy:

A 20-story office building has one busy elevator. On a recent trip upward, the elevator transported seven passengers. Each of these went up at least two floors, but no two of them went up the same number of floors. On this one upward journey, no more than one passenger crossed the elevator’s threshold on any given floor; no passenger exited on the 17th floor; and the elevator’s doors opened at more odd-numbered floors than even-numbered floors. Anton was the last passenger on and the second one off. Bessie got on before Clara and after Dagwood and went up more floors than Dagwood did. Edsel went up exactly twice as many floors as Filbert and got off before Gerda got on. Gerda was not the last one to exit.

Where did each passenger enter and exit the elevator?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

A Bad Night

He was prettily and fantastically troubled, who, having used to put his trust in dreams, one night dreamed that all dreams were vain; for he considered, if so, then this was vain, and then dreams might be true for all this: but if they might be true, then this dream might be so upon equal reason: and then dreams were vain, because this dream which told him so was true; and so round again.

— Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), “The Deceitfulness of the Heart”

| Oddities

All in the Family

This curious epitaph is found at Martham Church in Norfolk:

Here Lyeth the Body of Christr. Burraway, who departed this
Life ye 18 day of October, Anno Domini 1730.
Aged 59 years.

And there Lyes ☞
Alice who by his Life
Was my Sister, my mistress
My mother and my wife.
Dyed Feb. ye 12. 1729
Aged 76 years.

According to Thomas Joseph Pettigrew in Chronicles of the Tombs (1888), in 1670 Martham farmer Christopher Burraway had seduced his daughter, Alice, and she had borne him a son, who was placed at a foundling home. When the son turned 20 he was apprenticed to a farmer and eventually came to Martham, where he applied to Alice for a job, not knowing their relation. By this time the father was dead. She hired him and eventually married him, becoming “mother, sister, mistress and wife, to this modern Œedipus.”

At age 76 she recognized a peculiar mark on his shoulder and, realizing she’d married her son, “was so horror stricken that she soon after died, he surviving her scarcely four months.”

See Endless Love.

| Death · Oddities

Fast Rites

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dead_Stalin_bier.jpg

The Moscow Radio announced that five million Russians filed past Josef Stalin’s bier in 72 hours. That means, according to the calculations of Frank Baker, a Mangum, Okla., accountant, that the mourners, two abreast, three and one third feet apart, ran past the bier at 22 miles an hour. Twenty-two miles an hour is 9.3 seconds a hundred yards, which is the world’s record for the 100-yard dash — heretofore recorded only by America’s Mel Patton.

— Associated Press, Sept. 24, 1953

| History

Query

“If the northern hemisphere were land, and all the southern hemisphere water, ought we to call the northern hemisphere an island, or the southern hemisphere a lake?” — Augustus De Morgan

| Oddities