PROFITABLE MISTAKES.

Marlborough Daily Times, Volume X, Issue 248, 29 December 1887, Page 3

PROFITABLE MISTAKES.

An enterprising undertaker once went out to Jamaica, from Loudon, in hopes of bettering his condition. He was not disappointed business flourished, and he wrote to his father in England to send him a supply of black and grey cloth and twenty gross of black tacks. Carelessly, however, he omitted to cross the T, and tho order read “twenty gross of black jacks.” So his relative had made and shipped to him this large quantity of quart and pint tin pots, ornamented with paintings, and to which the maker had given the names of “ Black Jacks.” The young man, as may be imagined, was aghast at receiving this apparently useless consignment ; but an ingenious friend consoled him by offering to take them off his hands at tho invoieo price, and glad enough ho was to agree to the proposition. His bright friend then advertised for sale a new and fashionable punch vase just imported from England, and disposed of everyone of tho jacks, making 200 per cent. Sometime afterward, as the young men were talking over the lucky blunder, the friend said to the undertaker, in fun, ' Write to your father now and order a gross of warming-pans, just to see whether the well-informed people of London will havo the sagacity to consider such articles necessary in this latitude.’ Number one laughed at tho idea, hut thinking it a good joke, really did as suggested, and sure onough tho literal old goose of a father actually dispatched a gross of warming-pans to tho tropical island of Jamaica.

Again, the sou was in despair, and again his friend came to tho rescue and purchased the lot. Ho then knocked off tho covers and sold them to the planters as a new kind of sugar ladle. They went off like hot cakes arid lie realised a large profit. Both young men returned homo to England with fortunes, and had many a good laugh as they related the story of the black jacks and warming-pans, number two always ending with, “Nothing is lost in a good marketand lie might have added, “A ready wit can make things fit-”