Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 February 1885 — The Indigent Widow and Her Piano. [ARTICLE]

The Indigent Widow and Her Piano.

A clerk in the counting-room ofe a prominent New York paper told me of an ingenious scheme, which I imagine has never been exposed. A respectably dressed and prosperous-looking woman came into the office as if she owned it, and was rather proud of the fact, slammed down an advertisment with the requisite change on the counter, and smiled affably upon the clerk. “Still another?” asked the clerk,brightly. “Still another,” repeated the woman. “This time it’s a beauty, too. Come to me, you know, when you want one.” She smiled again and drifted out of the room. “For three years,” said the clerk, “that woman has had an advertisment in the paper every day, announcing that she has for sale at her residence a piano which will go at a bargain. The advertisment invariably states that the instrument has only been in use a week, and is in every respect as good as new, but that sudden reverses in fortune and a decision to move out of town force the owner to sell at once. I thought for the first five or six weeks that her ladyship was having a hard time to sell her piano. Then I began to smell a mouse. One winter night she was obliged to wait here a long time for a car, and a talk led her into a confession that she sold pianos in this way as a regular buai-

ness. She has an arrangement with the manufacturer, by which he furnishes her a fresh piano as soon as the last one is sold, and as they are all of cheap make, but rather showy, they manage to go off very well. She is anxious to keep her business very quiet, but it has been noised abroad, until she now has several competitors, and the Sunday papers will invariably have the names of four widows who are obliged to sell their pianos at once. Every one of them makes a good living by it '"—Brooklyn Eagle.