The narrator, a self-confessed fakir, recounts twenty years on the road through anecdotal episodes that detail schemes, canvasses, and cons used to sell goods, solicit auctions, and swindle or charm customers. Chapters follow early ambition and itinerant life, a variety of ruses—medicine, museum, auction, and novelty scams—tricks to avoid fares and lodgings, encounters with accomplices and rivals, arrests and near-bankruptcies, and methods for selling Bibles, musical instruments, and other wares. Practical maxims, stage jokes, and reflections on the hustler's contradictory ethos punctuate an episodic memoir of survival, improvisation, and showmanship in the itinerant trade.