the sea; such as wholesale purchases of fish, in which a large risk is run with an uncertain prospect of return—which is, it must be confessed, a somewhat far-fetched derivation.] This wholesale retailing of fish is also called bummareeing it.
1786. Report of Committee of City of London on Price of Provisions, 31. The bomarees will buy up half the fish the Salesmen have, and sell to the Fishmongers, [M.]
1851. Mayhew, London Labour and London Poor, I., 71. In Billingsgate the 'forestallers' or middle men are known as BUMMAREES . . . The BUMMAREE is the jobber or speculator on the fish exchange.
1859. Sala, Twice Round the Clock, 4 a.m., p. 17. Any one can be a bumbaree . . . The process of bumbareeing is very simple. It consists in buying as largely as your means will afford of an auctioneer, hiring a stall for sixpence, and retailing the fish at a swingeing profit.
Bummed, ppl, adj. (old).—Arrested. Cf. verb, Bum and Bum-bailiff.
Bummer, subs. (old.)—1. A bum-bailiff (q.v.).
2. (turf.)—A heavy loss; a severe pecuniary reverse.
3. (American.)—An idler; loafer; sponger; looter (see quots.). [From the German bummler, with a somewhat similar meaning, save that the term is used good naturedly, and has not altogether the offensive meaning of the American equivalent.] The term came into general use at the time of the Civil War, when it was specially applied to a straggler, hanger-on, or free-lance, particularly in connection with General Sherman's famous march from Atlanta to the sea. Besides its political signification, bummer is used as a general term of reproach in the same way as rascal, black-*leg, etc., are used in England. Other equivalents are heeler, STRIKER, STUFFER, and PRACTICAL POLITICIAN.
a. 1865. Major Nichols, Sherman's Great March. Look hyar, Captain, we bummers ain't so bad after all. We keep ahead of the skirmish line allers; we let's 'em know when an enemy's a comin', and then we ain't allus away from the regiment. We turns over all we don't want ourselves, and we can lick five times as many Rebs as we are any day.
1872. S. L. Clemens ('Mark Twain'), Roughing It, ch. xxiv. The auctioneer stormed up and down the streets on him for four days, dispersing the populace, interrupting business, and destroying children, and never got a bid—at least never any but the eighteen-dollar one he hired, a notoriously substanceless bummer, to make. The people only smiled pleasantly, and restrained their desire to buy, if they had any.
1872. Sacramento Weekly Union, Feb. 24, p. 2. All the boys to be trained as scriveners, tape-measurers, counter-hoppers, clerks, pettifoggers, polite loafers, street-hounds, hoodlums, and BUMMERS.
1875. Scribner's Magazine, p. 274. San Francisco is the Elysium of bummers. Nowhere can a worthless fellow, too lazy to work, too cowardly to steal, get on so well. The climate befriends him, for he can sleep out of doors four-fifths of the year. He can gorge himself daily for a nominal sum, and get a dinner that a king might envy for fifty cents.
1877. W. Black, Green Past. and Picc., ch. xiii. Then the great crowd of bummers and loafers, not finding the soil teeming with nuggets, stampeded off like a herd of buffalo.
1888. Philadelphia Press, Jan. 29. Coy is the chairman of the Democratic Central Committee in Marion County, and has wielded great power in politics as the boss of the bummers.
1888. Detroit Free Press, May 16. He finds that ten per cent. of the men who patronise these places have a collegiate education; forty per cent. are self-supporting, but prefer this precarious mode of living to anything more
