circulating, as I did, all about town, I had greater opportunities
for trading and acquiring.

It was not long before I had complete every series issued by every
cigarette manufacturer--such as the Great Race Horses, Parisian
Beauties, Women of All Nations, Flags of All Nations, Noted
Actors, Champion Prize Fighters, etc. And each series I had three
different ways: in the card from the cigarette package, in the
poster, and in the album.

Then I began to accumulate duplicate sets, duplicate albums. I
traded for other things that boys valued and which they usually
bought with money given them by their parents. Naturally, they
did not have the keen sense of values that I had, who was never
given money to buy anything. I traded for postage-stamps, for
minerals, for curios, for birds' eggs, for marbles (I had a more
magnificent collection of agates than I have ever seen any boy
possess--and the nucleus of the collection was a handful worth at
least three dollars, which I had kept as security for twenty cents
I loaned to a messenger-boy who was sent to reform school before
he could redeem them).

I'd trade anything and everything for anything else, and turn it
over in a dozen more trades until it was transmuted into something
that was worth something. I was famous as a trader. I was
notorious as a miser. I could even make a junkman weep when I had
dealings with him. Other boys called me in to sell for them their
collections of bottles, rags, old iron, grain, and gunny-sacks,
and five-gallon oil-cans--aye, and gave me a commission for doing
it.