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Bouton, John Bell

"Round the Block"

They took a fancy to bill posting, and worked industriously
and faithfully at it, because it was nocturnal, mysterious, romantic.
The half dollar which they each received for a night's labor, enabled
them to lounge about the streets all day in glorious indolence.
Sometimes there was a prodigious rush of business, and then the firm
were obliged to hire an extra force of boys.
Once, when a quack undertook to take the public by storm with his "New
and Sure Cure for Dyspepsia," Fink & Co. put a colored poster as large
as a dining table on every wall and high fence below Sixty-first street;
small oblong bills every ten feet along the curbstones of Broadway,
Bowery, Wall street, Fulton street, Cortlandt street, and Third, Fourth,
Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Madison, and Lexington Avenues; besides throwing
cheap circulars, folded, into the front yards of about four thousand
residences in the fashionable quarters of the town--all in a single
night. This immense job took one hundred boys.
Bog had been in this partnership since the first of January. It was now
near the close of March.


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