It is said that it takes one to know one.

That is good news for me, but not good enough at this moment.

It is of only small comfort that I am not at the level of a carnival huckster working a booth at the recent fair – sponsored by firefighters – in the Eagleville section of Lower Providence Township.

All we have to show for our brief time there Saturday afternoon are three stuffed animals, which are probably worth a combined $15, and a few whirls for Sofia on a rickety carousel — that dripped oil on the kid in front of us — for $100.

When you go to a carnival, you expect to run into “carnies.” Encountering this nomadic tribe is part of the romanticism — kind of like a few weekends back at the Native American pow-wow at Temple University’s Ambler campus, where we were up close and personal with real live “indigenous peoples of the Americas.”

But I never before experienced the type of borderline panhandling from the gap-toothed and unwashed crowd from a company called Reithoffer Shows working the booths Saturday.

Like hookers at Frankford and Kensington avenues in Philadelphia, they called out to us as we passed.

“Hey, Dad, win the little girl a prize,” was a common sales pitch.

If you looked away, you were a snob.

“Come on, where are going?” they would shout.

If you looked back at them, you got reeled in.

Even as we passed the snack stand and peeked in to see what the “food” looked like, I was practically accosted by the guy there asking me what he could get me.

I suppose the rain during the first few days of the “fair” really put these guys behind in their projected sales “nuts,” which I guess is no different for any peddler — from a Saab salesman to an insurance hound to someone trying to get you pop a balloon with darts or a throw a basketball in a net that was about 18-feet high, and probably not even wide enough to hold the ball.

I was rooked into both activities — the basketball toss (I hit the rim and it still didn’t go in) that Lebron James probably couldn’t get on 100 tries and the balloon-pop (you can get a toy, no problem, but at a prohibitive cost) — and learned the hard way that carnivals are not what they used to be (a chance to pick up the type of girl you would meet at a carnival).

The biggest con job came when I thought I’d be clever and cut to the chase. I offered the guy at the balloon-popping concession $10, straight-up, for the stuffed wolf that reminded Sofia of our former dog, Sandy (don’t worry, she’s not dead, just with a family who doesn’t mind having their furniture chewed).

A minute later, after some fast double-talk, he had me playing the game for $10 and winning a ... smaller animal. I eventually got the wolf, but it wasn’t until walking away that I realized it took $30 (he never gave back the original $10 and took another $20 from me to keep “playing up”).

I suppose a fool and his money — i.e. the father of a daddy’s girl — are easily parted, but should a family be subjected to such a series of swindles during what was intended to be a happy little outing?

And should a local fire department be sponsoring an event that left us with such a sour taste in our mouths that my wife said it may be the last time we ever go to a carnival?