Philadelphia buys thirty thousand dollars
worth of tickets. The portentous day approaches. The rail trains from
many of the prominent cities bring in dignified "Committees" who
come to see that the great abomination is conducted in a decent and
Christian manner. The throng presses in. Hold fast your tickets, all
you respectable New Yorkers, Philadelphians, and Bostonians, for the
wheel begins to move. The long agony is over. Hundreds of thousands
of people have made a narrow escape from being ruined by sudden
affluence. Swift horses are despatched, that, foam-lathered, dash up
to the house of him who owns the successful ticket. The lightnings
tell it to the four winds of heaven, and our weekly pictorials hasten
forward the photographers to take the picture of the famous man who
owned the ticket numbered 58,600. Multitudes think that there has been
foul play, and that, after all, they themselves, if the truth were
known, did draw the Opera House. Ten years from now there will stand
on the scaffold, or behind the prison door, or in the lonely room in
which the suicide writes his farewell to wife or parents, men who will
say that the first misstep of their life that put them on the wrong
road was the ticket they bought in the Crosby Opera House.
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