Читать книгу One Thousand Ways to Make a Living; or, An Encyclopædia of Plans to Make Money - Harold Morse Dunphy - Страница 177

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There are thousands of people who don’t believe—or at least pretend they don’t—in palmistry as a means of learning what the future has in store, but almost anyone is willing to pay for having the palm of the hand read, either through confidence or curiosity, for “there may be something in it, after all.”

Anyway, a lady in a southern city decided it was worth trying, so she sent 50 cents to a New York publisher for a book that revealed about all there is to be known of that science, and made a careful study of this book.

She first obtained an electrotype of a very pretty woman’s head,—not her own—and used it on her letter heads, which also bore an assumed but rather fancy name suggestive of the mysterious. She inserted an ad. in several papers, offering to read people’s palms for 50 cents each, and received many answers to this.

She had provided herself with a box of carbon impression paper, and to each person replying she mailed a piece of this about 4x8 inches, with instructions to lay the carbon paper on a sheet of plain white paper, on a hard, smooth surface, such as a table, the carbon side next to the white paper, and press the hand firmly down on the back of the carbon paper, so as to get a clean impression of the palm on the white paper, and, when this was done to send the impression, with 50 cents for a reading.

She was surprised at the large proportion of those who sent the money, but she gave a very good reading of each palm, and no one seemed to be dissatisfied, for she received no complaints. She had previously sent each one a letter, explaining how the ancient philosophers and others had recognized palmistry as a well established science, and this no doubt had impressed the recipients with the fact that it had much value as a means forecasting the future, as well as relating the past.