Temperance > Autobiography and personal recollections of John B. Gough

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN B. GOUGH.
dred dollars a year for three years, or if it is more con¬
venient to yon, fifteen hundred dollars at once. A cheek
on New York, payable to bearer, would confer lasting
obligation on yours,” &c. Petitions for aid in business,—
in paying notes due, or borrowed money, to travel. A young
man, a carpenter by trade, able to work, and with plenty
to do, once asked me to help him from one town to another.
I gave him a dollar; he said, “That’s not enough—the
fare is a dollar and a half.” “But,” I said, “the stage
fare is a dollar.” “Thunder!” said he, “do you suppose
I will jolt the life out of myself in a stage?—no, sir!" He
left me without the half dollar.
One man wrote me that he had a farm, and if he could
make two spires of grass grow where only one grew before,
he would be a philanthropist; there were so many stones
in his fields, that if he could get them out, he should be
able to double his crops. Would I give him two or three
gratuitous lectures? and as he was very busy, could I
name a day when I would meet him at the railway sta¬
tion (some forty miles from my home), and all prelimi¬
naries could he settled. My wife answered that letter.
This was an industrious beggar.
I have applications for piano-fortes, sewing-machines,
money to publish books, money to help out of jail, for a
horse, to build a house, for suits of clothes, for funds to
make a European voyage, for money to buy a wig, to pur¬
chase mules, to obtain an education, to pay off a mortgage,
for a trip to the sea-side, to support a failing newspaper,
to send a sister to boarding-school, to pay the premium on
insurance; and often with inaptly quoted passages of
Scripture. Persons write me or call on me, who knew me
when I lived somewhere—or heard me speak somewhere
—or knew some one that I knew—or had my name, only
spelled differently—and, needing a little money, felt their