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Show SOME STRANGE AVOCATIONS. Said a witness under cross-examination: "I am an early-caller. I calls different tradesmen at early hours from 1 till 5:30 in the morning, and that is how I get my living. I gets up between 12 and 1; I goes to bed at 6 and sleeps till the afternoon. I [section missing/unreadable] The early-callers fee is well earned, since but for his intervention his clients would often lose a day's pay, if not be thrown out of work altogether, by failing to keep time. <br><br> There are men in Paris, birds of a feather with the chiffonier, who go from hospital to hospital collecting the linseed plasters that have served the turn of doctor and patient; afterward pressing the oil from the linseed and disposing of the linen, after bleaching it, to the paper-maker. <br><br> Others make a couple of frames a day by collecting old cork, which being cleaned and pared, fetch, it is said, half a franc per hundred. <br><br> A lady resident of the Fanbourg St. Germania is credited with earning a good income by hatching red, black and brown ants for pheasant preservers. <br><br> One Parisian gets his living by breeding maggots out of the foul meats he buys of the chiffoniers, and fattening them up in the boxes. Another breeds maggots for the special behoof of nightingales, and a third marchand d'astecots boasts of selling between thirty and forty millions of worms every season for piscatorial purposes. He owns a great pit at Montmartre, wherein he keeps his store. Every day his scouts bring him fresh stock, for which he pays them from 5 to 10 pence per pound, according to quality; reselling them to anglers at just double those rates, and clearing thereby something over 800 pounds sterling a year.-Chambers' Journal. |