Excerpt from Rip-Raps, or Drift Thoughts Wide Apart So the best plan for a writer is, not to consider honesty as a mere policy, but to be frank in his principles, for men are very shrewd in this world, and as wise as serpents, although they seem sometimes to be as harmless as cooing cloves, and be not like the old fellow in the trade of the whisk brooms, who had been chuckling over his rival, boasting of his cheaper sale of the same stuff, he had only been thieving the stalks of this brush-corn from the fields, thinking thus to get ahead of his companion, who, in answer, confessed that he had stolen a march on the merchants in general, by stealing the whole broom from their stores. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.