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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son, by 
+George Horace Lorimer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
+       Being the Letters written by John Graham, Head of the House
+       of Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago, familiarly
+       known on 'Change as "Old Gorgon Graham," to his Son,
+       Pierrepont, facetiously known to his intimates as "Piggy."
+
+Author: George Horace Lorimer
+
+Release Date: June 28, 2007 [EBook #21959]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELF-MADE MERCHANT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Storer, Juliet Sutherland and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "_Young fellows come to me looking for jobs and telling
+me what a mean house they have been working for._"]
+
+
+            Letters from
+        A Self-Made Merchant
+             To His Son
+
+Being the Letters written by John Graham,
+Head of the House of Graham & Company,
+Pork-Packers in Chicago, familiarly known
+on 'Change as "Old Gorgon Graham," to
+his Son, Pierrepont, facetiously known
+to his intimates as "Piggy."
+
+
+Boston: Small, Maynard & Company: 1903
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+          _Copyright, 1901-1902,  by_
+          _THE CURTIS PUBLISHING CO._
+
+
+          _Copyright, 1901-1902,  by_
+            _GEORGE HORACE LORIMER_
+
+
+             _Copyright, 1902,  by_
+           _SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY_
+                (_Incorporated_)
+
+
+         _Entered at Stationers' Hall_
+
+           _Published October, 1902_
+
+       _Sixtieth Thousand December, 1902_
+
+
+                  _Plates by_
+        _Riggs Printing & Publishing Co._
+               _Albany,  U.S.A._
+
+
+                 _Presswork by_
+            _The University Press,_
+              _Cambridge, U.S.A._
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+                      TO
+                 CYRUS CURTIS
+               A SELF-MADE MAN
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS                                                      PAGE
+
+ I. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
+ to his son, Pierrepont, at Harvard University, Cambridge,
+ Mass.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has just become a member, in good and
+     regular standing, of the Freshman class._                   1
+
+ II. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
+ to his son, Pierrepont, at Harvard University.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont's expense account has just passed
+     under his father's eye, and has furnished him with a
+     text for some plain particularities._                      15
+
+ III. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in
+ Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Harvard University.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont finds Cambridge to his liking, and has
+     suggested that he take a post-graduate course to fill
+     up some gaps which he has found in his education._         29
+
+ IV. From John Graham, head of the house of Graham & Co.,
+ at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son,
+ Pierrepont Graham, at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has suggested the grand tour as a
+     proper finish to his education._                           45
+
+ V. From John Graham, head of the house of Graham & Co., at
+ the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont
+ Graham, at Lake Moosgatchemawamuc, in the Maine woods.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has written to his father withdrawing
+     his suggestion._                                           57
+
+ VI. From John Graham, en route to Texas, to Pierrepont
+ Graham, care of Graham & Co., Union Stock Yards, Chicago.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has, entirely without intention,
+     caused a little confusion in the mails, and it has
+     come to his father's notice in the course of
+     business._                                                 69
+
+ VII. From John Graham, at the Omaha Branch of Graham & Co.,
+ to Pierrepont Graham, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont hasn't found the methods of the worthy
+     Milligan altogether to his liking, and he has
+     commented rather freely on them._                          81
+
+ VIII. From John Graham, at Hot Springs, Arkansas, to his
+ son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has just been promoted from the
+     mailing to the billing desk and, in consequence, his
+     father is feeling rather "mellow" toward him._             93
+
+ IX. From John Graham, at Hot Springs, Arkansas, to his son,
+ Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has been investing more heavily in
+     roses than his father thinks his means warrant, and he
+     tries to turn his thoughts to staple groceries._          113
+
+ X. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
+ to his son, Pierrepont, at the Commercial House,
+ Jeffersonville, Indiana.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has been promoted to the position of
+     traveling salesman for the house, and has started out
+     on the road._                                             127
+
+ XI. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
+ to his son, Pierrepont, at The Planters' Palace Hotel, at
+ Big Gap, Kentucky.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont's orders are small and his expenses
+     are large, so his father feels pessimistic over his
+     prospects._                                               141
+
+ XII. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in
+ Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Little Delmonico's,
+ Prairie Centre, Indiana.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has annoyed his father by accepting
+     his criticisms in a spirit of gentle, but most
+     reprehensible, resignation._                              157
+
+ XIII. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in
+ Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, care of The Hoosier
+ Grocery Co., Indianapolis, Indiana.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont's orders have been looking up, so the
+     old man gives him a pat on the back--but not too hard
+     a one._                                                   177
+
+ XIV. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
+ to his son, Pierrepont, at The Travelers' Rest, New Albany,
+ Indiana.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has taken a little flyer in short ribs
+     on 'Change, and has accidentally come into the line of
+     his father's vision._                                     191
+
+ XV. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
+ to his son, Pierrepont, at The Scrub Oaks, Spring Lake,
+ Michigan.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has been promoted again, and the old
+     man sends him a little advice with his appointment._      209
+
+ XVI. From John Graham, at the Schweitzerkasenhof, Karlsbad,
+ Austria, to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards,
+ Chicago.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has shown mild symptoms of an attack
+     of society fever, and his father is administering some
+     simple remedies._                                         223
+
+ XVII. From John Graham, at the London House of Graham &
+ Co., to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in
+ Chicago.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has written his father that he is
+     getting along famously in his new place._                 243
+
+ XVIII. From John Graham, at the London House of Graham &
+ Co., to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in
+ Chicago.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont is worried over rumors that the old
+     man is a bear on lard and that the longs are about to
+     make him climb a tree._                                   259
+
+ XIX. From John Graham, at the New York house of Graham &
+ Co., to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in
+ Chicago.
+     _The old man, on the voyage home, has met a girl who
+     interests him and who in turn seems to be interested
+     in Mr. Pierrepont._                                       275
+
+ XX. From John Graham, at the Boston House of Graham & Co.,
+ to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in
+ Chicago.
+     _Mr. Pierrepont has told the old man "what's what" and
+     received a limited blessing._                             301
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+_By_ F. R. GRUGER _and_ B. MARTIN JUSTICE
+
+
+ 1. "Young fellows come to me looking for jobs
+       and telling me what a mean house they
+       have been working for."                       _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                       _Facing p._
+
+ 2. "Old Doc Hoover asked me right out in Sunday
+       School if I didn't want to be saved."                     4
+
+ 3. "I have seen hundreds of boys go to Europe
+       who didn't bring back a great deal except
+       a few trunks of badly fitting
+       clothes."                                                20
+
+ 4. "I put Jim Durham on the road to introduce
+       a new product."                                          38
+
+ 5. "Old Dick Stover was the worst hand at
+       procrastinating that I ever saw."                        50
+
+ 6. "Charlie Chase told me he was President of
+       the Klondike Exploring, Gold Prospecting,
+       and Immigration Company."                                62
+
+ 7. "Jim Donnelly, of the Donnelly Provision Company,
+       came into my office with a fool grin
+       on his fat face."                                        72
+
+ 8. "Bill Budlong was always the last man to
+       come up to the mourners' bench."                         84
+
+ 9. "Clarence looked to me like another of his
+       father's bad breaks."                                    98
+
+10. "You looked so blamed important and chesty
+       when you started off."                                  128
+
+11. "Josh Jenkinson would eat a little food now
+       and then just to be sociable, but what he
+       really lived on was tobacco."                           146
+
+12. "Herr Doctor Paracelsus Von Munsterberg
+       was a pretty high-toned article."                       166
+
+13. "When John L. Sullivan went through the
+       stock yards it just simply shut down the
+       plant."                                                 184
+
+14. "I started in to curl up that young fellow
+       to a crisp."                                            200
+
+15. "A good many salesmen have an idea that buyers
+       are only interested in funny stories."                  216
+
+16. "Jim Hicks dared Fatty Wilkins to eat a
+       piece of dirt."                                         248
+
+17. "Elder Hoover was accounted a powerful exhorter
+       in our parts."                                          268
+
+18. "Miss Curzon, with one of his roses in her
+       hair, watching him from a corner."                      294
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+                  +------------------------------+
+                  |            No. 1             |
+                  +------------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at        |
+                  |  the Union Stock Yards       |
+                  |  in Chicago, to his son,     |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at Harvard      |
+                  |  University, Cambridge,      |
+                  |  Mass. Mr. Pierrepont has    |
+                  |  just been settled by his    |
+                  |  mother as a member, in      |
+                  |  good and regular standing,  |
+                  |  of the Freshman class.      |
+                  +------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+          LETTERS _from a_ SELF-MADE MERCHANT _to his_ SON
+
+                              I
+
+
+                                         CHICAGO, October 1, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ Your Ma got back safe this morning and she wants me
+to be sure to tell you not to over-study, and I want to tell you to be
+sure not to under-study. What we're really sending you to Harvard for is
+to get a little of the education that's so good and plenty there. When
+it's passed around you don't want to be bashful, but reach right out and
+take a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You'll
+find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this
+world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of
+as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and
+the screw-driver lost.
+
+I didn't have your advantages when I was a boy, and you can't have mine.
+Some men learn the value of money by not having any and starting out to
+pry a few dollars loose from the odd millions that are lying around; and
+some learn it by having fifty thousand or so left to them and starting
+out to spend it as if it were fifty thousand a year. Some men learn the
+value of truth by having to do business with liars; and some by going to
+Sunday School. Some men learn the cussedness of whiskey by having a
+drunken father; and some by having a good mother. Some men get an
+education from other men and newspapers and public libraries; and some
+get it from professors and parchments--it doesn't make any special
+difference how you get a half-nelson on the right thing, just so you get
+it and freeze on to it. The package doesn't count after the eye's been
+attracted by it, and in the end it finds its way to the ash heap. It's
+the quality of the goods inside which tells, when they once get into the
+kitchen and up to the cook.
+
+You can cure a ham in dry salt and you can cure it in sweet pickle, and
+when you're through you've got pretty good eating either way, provided
+you started in with a sound ham. If you didn't, it doesn't make any
+special difference how you cured it--the ham-tryer's going to strike the
+sour spot around the bone. And it doesn't make any difference how much
+sugar and fancy pickle you soak into a fellow, he's no good unless he's
+sound and sweet at the core.
+
+The first thing that any education ought to give a man is character, and
+the second thing is education. That is where I'm a little skittish about
+this college business. I'm not starting in to preach to you, because I
+know a young fellow with the right sort of stuff in him preaches to
+himself harder than any one else can, and that he's mighty often
+switched off the right path by having it pointed out to him in the wrong
+way.
+
+I remember when I was a boy, and I wasn't a very bad boy, as boys go,
+old Doc Hoover got a notion in his head that I ought to join the church,
+and he scared me out of it for five years by asking me right out loud in
+Sunday School if I didn't want to be saved, and then laying for me after
+the service and praying with me. Of course I wanted to be saved, but I
+didn't want to be saved quite so publicly.
+
+When a boy's had a good mother he's got a good conscience, and when he's
+got a good conscience he don't need to have right and wrong labeled for
+him. Now that your Ma's left and the apron strings are cut, you're
+naturally running up against a new sensation every minute, but if you'll
+simply use a little conscience as a tryer, and probe into a thing which
+looks sweet and sound on the skin, to see if you can't fetch up a sour
+smell from around the bone, you'll be all right.
+
+[Illustration: "_Old Doc Hoover asked me right out in Sunday School if I
+didn't want to be saved._"]
+
+I'm anxious that you should be a good scholar, but I'm more anxious that
+you should be a good clean man. And if you graduate with a sound
+conscience, I shan't care so much if there are a few holes in your
+Latin. There are two parts of a college education--the part that you get
+in the schoolroom from the professors, and the part that you get outside
+of it from the boys. That's the really important part. For the first
+can only make you a scholar, while the second can make you a man.
+
+Education's a good deal like eating--a fellow can't always tell which
+particular thing did him good, but he can usually tell which one did him
+harm. After a square meal of roast beef and vegetables, and mince pie
+and watermelon, you can't say just which ingredient is going into muscle,
+but you don't have to be very bright to figure out which one started the
+demand for painkiller in your insides, or to guess, next morning, which
+one made you believe in a personal devil the night before. And so, while
+a fellow can't figure out to an ounce whether it's Latin or algebra or
+history or what among the solids that is building him up in this place
+or that, he can go right along feeding them in and betting that they're
+not the things that turn his tongue fuzzy. It's down among the sweets,
+among his amusements and recreations, that he's going to find his
+stomach-ache, and it's there that he wants to go slow and to pick and
+choose.
+
+It's not the first half, but the second half of a college education
+which merchants mean when they ask if a college education pays. It's the
+Willie and the Bertie boys; the chocolate eclair and tutti-frutti boys;
+the la-de-dah and the baa-baa-billy-goat boys; the high cock-a-lo-rum
+and the cock-a-doodle-do boys; the Bah Jove!, hair-parted-in-the-middle,
+cigaroot-smoking, Champagne-Charlie, up-all-night-and-in-all-day boys
+that make 'em doubt the cash value of the college output, and overlook
+the roast-beef and blood-gravy boys, the shirt-sleeves and
+high-water-pants boys, who take their college education and make some
+fellow's business hum with it.
+
+Does a College education pay? Does it pay to feed in pork trimmings at
+five cents a pound at the hopper and draw out nice, cunning, little
+"country" sausages at twenty cents a pound at the other end? Does it
+pay to take a steer that's been running loose on the range and living
+on cactus and petrified wood till he's just a bunch of barb-wire and
+sole-leather, and feed him corn till he's just a solid hunk of
+porterhouse steak and oleo oil?
+
+You bet it pays. Anything that trains a boy to think and to think quick
+pays; anything that teaches a boy to get the answer before the other
+fellow gets through biting the pencil, pays.
+
+College doesn't make fools; it develops them. It doesn't make
+bright men; it develops them. A fool will turn out a fool, whether
+he goes to college or not, though he'll probably turn out a
+different sort of a fool. And a good, strong boy will turn out a
+bright, strong man whether he's worn smooth in the
+grab-what-you-want-and-eat-standing-with-one-eye-skinned-for-the-dog
+school of the streets and stores, or polished up and slicked down in the
+give-your-order-to-the-waiter-and-get-a-sixteen-course-dinner school of
+the professors. But while the lack of a college education can't keep No.
+1 down, having it boosts No. 2 up.
+
+It's simply the difference between jump in, rough-and-tumble,
+kick-with-the-heels-and-butt-with-the-head nigger
+fighting, and this grin-and-look-pleasant,
+dodge-and-save-your-wind-till-you-see-a-chance-to-land-on-the-solar-plexus
+style of the trained athlete. Both styles win fights, but the fellow
+with a little science is the better man, providing he's kept his muscle
+hard. If he hasn't, he's in a bad way, for his fancy sparring is just
+going to aggravate the other fellow so that he'll eat him up.
+
+Of course, some men are like pigs, the more you educate them, the more
+amusing little cusses they become, and the funnier capers they cut when
+they show off their tricks. Naturally, the place to send a boy of that
+breed is to the circus, not to college.
+
+Speaking of educated pigs, naturally calls to mind the case of old man
+Whitaker and his son, Stanley. I used to know the old man mighty well
+ten years ago. He was one of those men whom business narrows, instead
+of broadens. Didn't get any special fun out of his work, but kept right
+along at it because he didn't know anything else. Told me he'd had to
+root for a living all his life and that he proposed to have Stan's
+brought to him in a pail. Sent him to private schools and dancing
+schools and colleges and universities, and then shipped him to Oxford
+to soak in a little "atmosphere," as he put it. I never could quite lay
+hold of that atmosphere dodge by the tail, but so far as I could make
+out, the idea was that there was something in the air of the Oxford
+ham-house that gave a fellow an extra fancy smoke.
+
+Well, about the time Stan was through, the undertaker called by for the
+old man, and when his assets were boiled down and the water drawn off,
+there wasn't enough left to furnish Stan with a really nourishing meal.
+I had a talk with Stan about what he was going to do, but some ways he
+didn't strike me as having the making of a good private of industry, let
+alone a captain, so I started in to get him a job that would suit his
+talents. Got him in a bank, but while he knew more about the history of
+banking than the president, and more about political economy than the
+board of directors, he couldn't learn the difference between a fiver
+that the Government turned out and one that was run off on a hand press
+in a Halsted Street basement. Got him a job on a paper, but while he
+knew six different languages and all the facts about the Arctic regions,
+and the history of dancing from the days of Old Adam down to those of
+Old Nick, he couldn't write up a satisfactory account of the Ice-Men's
+Ball. Could prove that two and two made four by trigonometry and
+geometry, but couldn't learn to keep books; was thick as thieves with
+all the high-toned poets, but couldn't write a good, snappy,
+merchantable street-car ad.; knew a thousand diseases that would take a
+man off before he could blink, but couldn't sell a thousand-dollar
+tontine policy; knew the lives of our Presidents as well as if he'd been
+raised with them, but couldn't place a set of the Library of the Fathers
+of the Republic, though they were offered on little easy payments that
+made them come as easy as borrowing them from a friend. Finally I hit on
+what seemed to be just the right thing. I figured out that any fellow
+who had such a heavy stock of information on hand, ought to be able to
+job it out to good advantage, and so I got him a place teaching. But it
+seemed that he'd learned so much about the best way of teaching boys,
+that he told his principal right on the jump that he was doing it all
+wrong, and that made him sore; and he knew so much about the dead
+languages, which was what he was hired to teach, that he forgot he was
+handling live boys, and as he couldn't tell it all to them in the
+regular time, he kept them after hours, and that made them sore and put
+Stan out of a job again. The last I heard of him he was writing articles
+on Why Young Men Fail, and making a success of it, because failing was
+the one subject on which he was practical.
+
+I simply mention Stan in passing as an example of the fact that it isn't
+so much knowing a whole lot, as knowing a little and how to use it that
+counts.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 2            |
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at      |
+                  |  the Union Stock Yards     |
+                  |  in Chicago, to his son,   |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at Harvard    |
+                  |  University.               |
+                  |                            |
+                  |  Mr. Pierrepont's expense  |
+                  |  account has just passed   |
+                  |  under his father's eye,   |
+                  |  and has furnished him     |
+                  |  with a text for some      |
+                  |  plain particularities.    |
+                  +----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              II
+
+
+                                             CHICAGO, May 4, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ The cashier has just handed me your expense account
+for the month, and it fairly makes a fellow hump-shouldered to look it
+over. When I told you that I wished you to get a liberal education, I
+didn't mean that I wanted to buy Cambridge. Of course the bills won't
+break me, but they will break you unless you are very, very careful.
+
+I have noticed for the last two years that your accounts have been
+growing heavier every month, but I haven't seen any signs of your taking
+honors to justify the increased operating expenses; and that is bad
+business--a good deal like feeding his weight in corn to a scalawag
+steer that won't fat up.
+
+I haven't said anything about this before, as I trusted a good deal to
+your native common-sense to keep you from making a fool of yourself in
+the way that some of these young fellows who haven't had to work for it
+do. But because I have sat tight, I don't want you to get it into your
+head that the old man's rich, and that he can stand it, because he won't
+stand it after you leave college. The sooner you adjust your spending to
+what your earning capacity will be, the easier they will find it to live
+together.
+
+The only sure way that a man can get rich quick is to have it given to
+him or to inherit it. You are not going to get rich that way--at least,
+not until after you have proved your ability to hold a pretty important
+position with the firm; and, of course, there is just one place from
+which a man can start for that position with Graham & Co. It doesn't
+make any difference whether he is the son of the old man or of the
+cellar boss--that place is the bottom. And the bottom in the office end
+of this business is a seat at the mailing-desk, with eight dollars every
+Saturday night.
+
+I can't hand out any ready-made success to you. It would do you no good,
+and it would do the house harm. There is plenty of room at the top here,
+but there is no elevator in the building. Starting, as you do, with a
+good education, you should be able to climb quicker than the fellow who
+hasn't got it; but there's going to be a time when you begin at the
+factory when you won't be able to lick stamps so fast as the other boys
+at the desk. Yet the man who hasn't licked stamps isn't fit to write
+letters. Naturally, that is the time when knowing whether the pie comes
+before the ice-cream, and how to run an automobile isn't going to be of
+any real use to you.
+
+I simply mention these things because I am afraid your ideas as to the
+basis on which you are coming with the house have swelled up a little in
+the East. I can give you a start, but after that you will have to
+dynamite your way to the front by yourself. It is all with the man. If
+you gave some fellows a talent wrapped in a napkin to start with in
+business, they would swap the talent for a gold brick and lose the
+napkin; and there are others that you could start out with just a
+napkin, who would set up with it in the dry-goods business in a small
+way, and then coax the other fellow's talent into it.
+
+I have pride enough to believe that you have the right sort of stuff in
+you, but I want to see some of it come out. You will never make a good
+merchant of yourself by reversing the order in which the Lord decreed
+that we should proceed--learning the spending before the earning end of
+business. Pay day is always a month off for the spend-thrift, and he is
+never able to realize more than sixty cents on any dollar that comes to
+him. But a dollar is worth one hundred and six cents to a good business
+man, and he never spends the dollar. It's the man who keeps saving up
+and expenses down that buys an interest in the concern. That is where
+you are going to find yourself weak if your expense accounts don't lie;
+and they generally don't lie in that particular way, though Baron
+Munchausen was the first traveling man, and my drummers' bills still
+show his influence.
+
+I know that when a lot of young men get off by themselves, some of them
+think that recklessness with money brands them as good fellows, and that
+carefulness is meanness. That is the one end of a college education
+which is pure cussedness; and that is the one thing which makes nine
+business men out of ten hesitate to send their boys off to school. But
+on the other hand, that is the spot where a young man has the chance to
+show that he is not a light-weight. I know that a good many people say I
+am a pretty close proposition; that I make every hog which goes through
+my packing-house give up more lard than the Lord gave him gross weight;
+that I have improved on Nature to the extent of getting four hams out
+of an animal which began life with two; but you have lived with me long
+enough to know that my hand is usually in my pocket at the right time.
+
+Now I want to say right here that the meanest man alive is the one who
+is generous with money that he has not had to sweat for, and that the
+boy who is a good fellow at some one else's expense would not work up
+into first-class fertilizer. That same ambition to be known as a good
+fellow has crowded my office with second-rate clerks, and they always
+will be second-rate clerks. If you have it, hold it down until you have
+worked for a year. Then, if your ambition runs to hunching up all week
+over a desk, to earn eight dollars to blow on a few rounds of drinks for
+the boys on Saturday night, there is no objection to your gratifying it;
+for I will know that the Lord didn't intend you to be your own boss.
+
+[Illustration: "_I have seen hundreds of boys go to Europe who didn't
+bring back a great deal except a few trunks of badly fitting
+clothes._"]
+
+You know how I began--I was started off with a kick, but that proved a
+kick up, and in the end every one since has lifted me a little bit higher.
+I got two dollars a week, and slept under the counter, and you can bet I
+knew just how many pennies there were in each of those dollars, and how
+hard the floor was. That is what you have got to learn.
+
+I remember when I was on the Lakes, our schooner was passing out through
+the draw at Buffalo when I saw little Bill Riggs, the butcher, standing
+up above me on the end of the bridge with a big roast of beef in his
+basket. They were a little short in the galley on that trip, so I called
+up to Bill and he threw the roast down to me. I asked him how much, and
+he yelled back, "about a dollar." That was mighty good beef, and when we
+struck Buffalo again on the return trip, I thought I would like a little
+more of it. So I went up to Bill's shop and asked him for a piece of the
+same. But this time he gave me a little roast, not near so big as the
+other, and it was pretty tough and stringy. But when I asked him how
+much, he answered "about a dollar." He simply didn't have any sense of
+values, and that's the business man's sixth sense. Bill has always been
+a big, healthy, hard-working man, but to-day he is very, very poor.
+
+The Bills ain't all in the butcher business. I've got some of them right
+now in my office, but they will never climb over the railing that
+separates the clerks from the executives. Yet if they would put in half
+the time thinking for the house that they give up to hatching out
+reasons why they ought to be allowed to overdraw their salary accounts,
+I couldn't keep them out of our private offices with a pole-ax, and I
+wouldn't want to; for they could double their salaries and my profits in
+a year. But I always lay it down as a safe proposition that the fellow
+who has to break open the baby's bank toward the last of the week for
+car-fare isn't going to be any Russell Sage when it comes to trading
+with the old man's money. He'd punch my bank account as full of holes as
+a carload of wild Texans would a fool stockman that they'd got in a
+corner.
+
+Now I know you'll say that I don't understand how it is; that you've got
+to do as the other fellows do; and that things have changed since I was
+a boy. There's nothing in it. Adam invented all the different ways in
+which a young man can make a fool of himself, and the college yell at
+the end of them is just a frill that doesn't change essentials. The boy
+who does anything just because the other fellows do it is apt to scratch
+a poor man's back all his life. He's the chap that's buying wheat at
+ninety-seven cents the day before the market breaks. They call him "the
+country" in the market reports, but the city's full of him. It's the
+fellow who has the spunk to think and act for himself, and sells short
+when prices hit the high C and the house is standing on its hind legs
+yelling for more, that sits in the directors' meetings when he gets on
+toward forty.
+
+We've got an old steer out at the packing-house that stands around at
+the foot of the runway leading up to the killing pens, looking for all
+the world like one of the village fathers sitting on the cracker box
+before the grocery--sort of sad-eyed, dreamy old cuss--always has two or
+three straws from his cud sticking out of the corner of his mouth. You
+never saw a steer that looked as if he took less interest in things. But
+by and by the boys drive a bunch of steers toward him, or cows maybe, if
+we're canning, and then you'll see Old Abe move off up that runway, sort
+of beckoning the bunch after him with that wicked old stump of a tail of
+his, as if there was something mighty interesting to steers at the top,
+and something that every Texan and Colorado, raw from the prairies,
+ought to have a look at to put a metropolitan finish on him. Those
+steers just naturally follow along on up that runway and into the
+killing pens. But just as they get to the top, Old Abe, someways, gets
+lost in the crowd, and he isn't among those present when the gates are
+closed and the real trouble begins for his new friends.
+
+I never saw a dozen boys together that there wasn't an Old Abe among
+them. If you find your crowd following him, keep away from it. There
+are times when it's safest to be lonesome. Use a little common-sense,
+caution and conscience. You can stock a store with those three
+commodities, when you get enough of them. But you've got to begin
+getting them young. They ain't catching after you toughen up a bit.
+
+You needn't write me if you feel yourself getting them. The symptoms
+will show in your expense account. Good-by; life's too short to write
+letters and New York's calling me on the wire.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +-------------------------------+
+                  |             No. 3             |
+                  +-------------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at the     |
+                  |  Union Stock Yards in         |
+                  |  Chicago, to his son,         |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at Harvard       |
+                  |  University. Mr. Pierrepont   |
+                  |  finds Cambridge to his       |
+                  |  liking, and has suggested    |
+                  |  that he take a post-graduate |
+                  |  course to fill up some       |
+                  |  gaps which he has found      |
+                  |  in his education.            |
+                  +-------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              III
+
+
+                                                     June 1, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ No, I can't say that I think anything of your
+post-graduate course idea. You're not going to be a poet or a professor,
+but a packer, and the place to take a post-graduate course for that
+calling is in the packing-house. Some men learn all they know from
+books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all
+theory; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough
+about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world
+a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it.
+
+There's a chance for everything you have learned, from Latin to poetry,
+in the packing business, though we don't use much poetry here except in
+our street-car ads., and about the only time our products are given
+Latin names is when the State Board of Health condemns them. So I think
+you'll find it safe to go short a little on the frills of education; if
+you want them bad enough you'll find a way to pick them up later, after
+business hours.
+
+The main thing is to get a start along right lines, and that is what I
+sent you to college for. I didn't expect you to carry off all the
+education in sight--I knew you'd leave a little for the next fellow.
+But I wanted you to form good mental habits, just as I want you to have
+clean, straight physical ones. Because I was run through a threshing
+machine when I was a boy, and didn't begin to get the straw out of my
+hair till I was past thirty, I haven't any sympathy with a lot of these
+old fellows who go around bragging of their ignorance and saying that
+boys don't need to know anything except addition and the "best policy"
+brand of honesty.
+
+We started in a mighty different world, and we were all ignorant
+together. The Lord let us in on the ground floor, gave us corner lots,
+and then started in to improve the adjacent property. We didn't have to
+know fractions to figure out our profits. Now a merchant needs astronomy
+to see them, and when he locates them they are out somewhere near the
+fifth decimal place. There are sixteen ounces to the pound still, but
+two of them are wrapping paper in a good many stores. And there're just
+as many chances for a fellow as ever, but they're a little gun shy, and
+you can't catch them by any such coarse method as putting salt on their
+tails.
+
+Thirty years ago, you could take an old muzzle-loader and knock over
+plenty of ducks in the city limits, and Chicago wasn't Cook County then,
+either. You can get them still, but you've got to go to Kankakee and
+take a hammerless along. And when I started in the packing business it
+was all straight sailing--no frills--just turning hogs into hog
+meat--dry salt for the niggers down South and sugar-cured for the white
+folks up North. Everything else was sausage, or thrown away. But when we
+get through with a hog nowadays, he's scattered through a hundred
+different cans and packages, and he's all accounted for. What we used to
+throw away is our profit. It takes doctors, lawyers, engineers, poets,
+and I don't know what, to run the business, and I reckon that
+improvements which call for parsons will be creeping in next. Naturally,
+a young man who expects to hold his own when he is thrown in with a lot
+of men like these must be as clean and sharp as a hound's tooth, or some
+other fellow's simply going to eat him up.
+
+The first college man I ever hired was old John Durham's son, Jim. That
+was a good many years ago when the house was a much smaller affair.
+Jim's father had a lot of money till he started out to buck the universe
+and corner wheat. And the boy took all the fancy courses and trimmings
+at college. The old man was mighty proud of Jim. Wanted him to be a
+literary fellow. But old Durham found out what every one learns who gets
+his ambitions mixed up with number two red--that there's a heap of it
+lying around loose in the country. The bears did quick work and kept the
+cash wheat coming in so lively that one settling day half a dozen of us
+had to get under the market to keep it from going to everlasting smash.
+
+That day made young Jim a candidate for a job. It didn't take him long
+to decide that the Lord would attend to keeping up the visible supply of
+poetry, and that he had better turn his attention to the stocks of mess
+pork. Next morning he was laying for me with a letter of introduction
+when I got to the office, and when he found that I wouldn't have a
+private secretary at any price, he applied for every other position on
+the premises right down to office boy. I told him I was sorry, but I
+couldn't do anything for him then; that we were letting men go, but I'd
+keep him in mind, and so on. The fact was that I didn't think a fellow
+with Jim's training would be much good, anyhow. But Jim hung on--said
+he'd taken a fancy to the house, and wanted to work for it. Used to call
+by about twice a week to find out if anything had turned up.
+
+Finally, after about a month of this, he wore me down so that I stopped
+him one day as he was passing me on the street. I thought I'd find out
+if he really was so red-hot to work as he pretended to be; besides, I
+felt that perhaps I hadn't treated the boy just right, as I had
+delivered quite a jag of that wheat to his father myself.
+
+"Hello, Jim," I called; "do you still want that job?"
+
+"Yes, sir," he answered, quick as lightning.
+
+"Well, I tell you how it is, Jim," I said, looking up at him--he was one
+of those husky, lazy-moving six-footers--"I don't see any chance in the
+office, but I understand they can use another good, strong man in one of
+the loading gangs."
+
+I thought that would settle Jim and let me out, for it's no joke lugging
+beef, or rolling barrels and tierces a hundred yards or so to the cars.
+But Jim came right back at me with, "Done. Who'll I report to?"
+
+That sporty way of answering, as if he was closing a bet, made me surer
+than ever that he was not cut out for a butcher. But I told him, and off
+he started hot-foot to find the foreman. I sent word by another route to
+see that he got plenty to do.
+
+I forgot all about Jim until about three months later, when his name was
+handed up to me for a new place and a raise in pay. It seemed that he
+had sort of abolished his job. After he had been rolling barrels a
+while, and the sport had ground down one of his shoulders a couple of
+inches lower than the other, he got to scheming around for a way to make
+the work easier, and he hit on an idea for a sort of overhead railroad
+system, by which the barrels could be swung out of the storerooms and
+run right along into the cars, and two or three men do the work of a
+gang. It was just as I thought. Jim was lazy, but he had put the house
+in the way of saving so much money that I couldn't fire him. So I raised
+his salary, and made him an assistant timekeeper and checker. Jim kept
+at this for three or four months, until his feet began to hurt him, I
+guess, and then he was out of a job again. It seems he had heard
+something of a new machine for registering the men, that did away with
+most of the timekeepers except the fellows who watched the machines, and
+he kept after the Superintendent until he got him to put them in. Of
+course he claimed a raise again for effecting such a saving, and we just
+had to allow it.
+
+I was beginning to take an interest in Jim, so I brought him up into the
+office and set him to copying circular letters. We used to send out a
+raft of them to the trade. That was just before the general adoption of
+typewriters, when they were still in the experimental stage. But Jim
+hadn't been in the office plugging away at the letters for a month
+before he had the writer's cramp, and began nosing around again. The
+first thing I knew he was sicking the agents for the new typewriting
+machine on to me, and he kept them pounding away until they had made me
+give them a trial. Then it was all up with Mister Jim's job again. I
+raised his salary without his asking for it this time, and put him out
+on the road to introduce a new product that we were making--beef
+extract.
+
+Jim made two trips without selling enough to keep them working overtime
+at the factory, and then he came into my office with a long story about
+how we were doing it all wrong. Said we ought to go for the consumer by
+advertising, and make the trade come to us, instead of chasing it up.
+
+That was so like Jim that I just laughed at first; besides, that sort of
+advertising was a pretty new thing then, and I was one of the old-timers
+who didn't take any stock in it. But Jim just kept plugging away at me
+between trips, until finally I took him off the road and told him to go
+ahead and try it in a small way.
+
+Jim pretty nearly scared me to death that first year. At last he had got
+into something that he took an interest in--spending money--and he just
+fairly wallowed in it. Used to lay awake nights, thinking up new ways of
+getting rid of the old man's profits. And he found them. Seemed as if I
+couldn't get away from Graham's Extract, and whenever I saw it I gagged,
+for I knew it was costing me money that wasn't coming back; but every
+time I started to draw in my horns Jim talked to me, and showed me where
+there was a fortune waiting for me just around the corner.
+
+[Illustration: "_I put Jim Durham out on the road to introduce a new
+product._"]
+
+Graham's Extract started out by being something that you could make
+beef-tea out of--that was all. But before Jim had been fooling with it a
+month he had got his girl to think up a hundred different ways in which
+it could be used, and had advertised them all. It seemed there was
+nothing you could cook that didn't need a dash of it. He kept me between
+a chill and a sweat all the time. Sometimes, but not often, I just _had_
+to grin at his foolishness. I remember one picture he got out showing
+sixteen cows standing between something that looked like a letter-press,
+and telling how every pound or so of Graham's Extract contained the
+juice squeezed from a herd of steers. If an explorer started for the
+North Pole, Jim would send him a case of Extract, and then advertise
+that it was the great heat-maker for cold climates; and if some other
+fellow started across Africa he sent _him_ a case, too, and advertised
+what a bully drink it was served up with a little ice.
+
+He broke out in a new place every day, and every time he broke out it
+cost the house money. Finally, I made up my mind to swallow the loss,
+and Mister Jim was just about to lose his job sure enough, when the
+orders for Extract began to look up, and he got a reprieve; then he
+began to make expenses, and he got a pardon; and finally a rush came
+that left him high and dry in a permanent place. Jim was all right in
+his way, but it was a new way, and I hadn't been broad-gauged enough to
+see that it was a better way.
+
+That was where I caught the connection between a college education and
+business. I've always made it a rule to buy brains, and I've learned now
+that the better trained they are the faster they find reasons for
+getting their salaries raised. The fellow who hasn't had the training
+may be just as smart, but he's apt to paw the air when he's reaching
+for ideas.
+
+I suppose you're asking why, if I'm so hot for education, I'm against
+this post-graduate course. But habits of thought ain't the only thing a
+fellow picks up at college.
+
+I see you've been elected President of your class. I'm glad the boys
+aren't down on you, but while the most popular man in his class isn't
+always a failure in business, being as popular as that takes up a heap
+of time. I noticed, too, when you were home Easter, that you were
+running to sporty clothes and cigarettes. There's nothing criminal about
+either, but I don't hire sporty clerks at all, and the only part of the
+premises on which cigarette smoking is allowed is the fertilizer
+factory.
+
+I simply mention this in passing. I have every confidence in your
+ultimate good sense, and I guess you'll see the point without my
+elaborating with a meat ax my reasons for thinking that you've had
+enough college for the present.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 4             |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, head     |
+                  |  of the house of Graham     |
+                  |  & Co., at the Union Stock  |
+                  |  Yards in Chicago, to his   |
+                  |  son, Pierrepont Graham,    |
+                  |  at the Waldorf-Astoria,    |
+                  |  in New York. Mr.           |
+                  |  Pierrepont has suggested   |
+                  |  the grand tour as a        |
+                  |  proper finish to his       |
+                  |  education.                 |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              IV
+
+
+                                                    June 25, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ Your letter of the seventh twists around the point
+a good deal like a setter pup chasing his tail. But I gather from it that
+you want to spend a couple of months in Europe before coming on here and
+getting your nose in the bull-ring. Of course, you are your own boss now
+and you ought to be able to judge better than any one else how much time
+you have to waste, but it seems to me, on general principles, that a
+young man of twenty-two, who is physically and mentally sound, and who
+hasn't got a dollar and has never earned one, can't be getting on
+somebody's pay-roll too quick. And in this connection it is only fair to
+tell you that I have instructed the cashier to discontinue your
+allowance after July 15. That gives you two weeks for a vacation--enough
+to make a sick boy well, or a lazy one lazier.
+
+I hear a good deal about men who won't take vacations, and who kill
+themselves by overwork, but it's usually worry or whiskey. It's not what
+a man does during working-hours, but after them, that breaks down his
+health. A fellow and his business should be bosom friends in the office
+and sworn enemies out of it. A clear mind is one that is swept clean of
+business at six o'clock every night and isn't opened up for it again
+until after the shutters are taken down next morning.
+
+Some fellows leave the office at night and start out to whoop it up with
+the boys, and some go home to sit up with their troubles--they're both
+in bad company. They're the men who are always needing vacations, and
+never getting any good out of them. What every man does need once a year
+is a change of work--that is, if he has been curved up over a desk for
+fifty weeks and subsisting on birds and burgundy, he ought to take to
+fishing for a living and try bacon and eggs, with a little spring
+water, for dinner. But coming from Harvard to the packing-house will
+give you change enough this year to keep you in good trim, even if you
+didn't have a fortnight's leeway to run loose.
+
+You will always find it a safe rule to take a thing just as quick as it
+is offered--especially a job. It is never easy to get one except when
+you don't want it; but when you have to get work, and go after it with
+a gun, you'll find it as shy as an old crow that every farmer in the
+county has had a shot at.
+
+When I was a young fellow and out of a place, I always made it a rule to
+take the first job that offered, and to use it for bait. You can catch a
+minnow with a worm, and a bass will take your minnow. A good fat bass
+will tempt an otter, and then you've got something worth skinning. Of
+course, there's no danger of your not being able to get a job with the
+house--in fact, there is no real way in which you can escape getting
+one; but I don't like to see you shy off every time the old man gets
+close to you with the halter.
+
+I want you to learn right at the outset not to play with the spoon
+before you take the medicine. Putting off an easy thing makes it hard,
+and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. Procrastination is the
+longest word in the language, but there's only one letter between its
+ends when they occupy their proper places in the alphabet.
+
+Old Dick Stover, for whom I once clerked in Indiana, was the worst hand
+at procrastinating that I ever saw. Dick was a powerful hearty eater,
+and no one ever loved meal-time better, but he used to keep turning over
+in bed mornings for just another wink and staving off getting up, until
+finally his wife combined breakfast and dinner on him, and he only got
+two meals a day. He was a mighty religious man, too, but he got to
+putting off saying his prayers until after he was in bed, and then he
+would keep passing them along until his mind was clear of worldly
+things, and in the end he would drop off to sleep without saying them
+at all. What between missing the Sunday morning service and never being
+seen on his knees, the first thing Dick knew he was turned out of the
+church. He had a pretty good business when I first went with him, but he
+would keep putting off firing his bad clerks until they had lit out with
+the petty cash; and he would keep putting off raising the salaries of
+his good ones until his competitor had hired them away. Finally, he got
+so that he wouldn't discount his bills, even when he had the money; and
+when they came due he would give notes so as to keep from paying out his
+cash a little longer. Running a business on those lines is, of course,
+equivalent to making a will in favor of the sheriff and committing
+suicide so that he can inherit. The last I heard of Dick he was
+ninety-three years old and just about to die. That was ten years ago,
+and I'll bet he's living yet. I simply mention Dick in passing as an
+instance of how habits rule a man's life.
+
+There is one excuse for every mistake a man can make, but only one. When
+a fellow makes the same mistake twice he's got to throw up both hands
+and own up to carelessness or cussedness. Of course, I knew that you
+would make a fool of yourself pretty often when I sent you to college,
+and I haven't been disappointed. But I expected you to narrow down the
+number of combinations possible by making a different sort of a fool of
+yourself every time. That is the important thing, unless a fellow has
+too lively an imagination, or has none at all. You are bound to try this
+European foolishness sooner or later, but if you will wait a few years,
+you will approach it in an entirely different spirit--and you will come
+back with a good deal of respect for the people who have sense enough to
+stay at home.
+
+[Illustration: "_Old Dick Stover was the worst hand at procrastinating
+that I ever saw._"]
+
+I piece out from your letter that you expect a few months on the other
+side will sort of put a polish on you. I don't want to seem pessimistic,
+but I have seen hundreds of boys graduate from college and go over with
+the same idea, and they didn't bring back a great deal except a few
+trunks of badly fitting clothes. Seeing the world is like charity--it
+covers a multitude of sins, and, like charity, it ought to begin at
+home.
+
+Culture is not a matter of a change of climate. You'll hear more about
+Browning to the square foot in the Mississippi Valley than you will in
+England. And there's as much Art talk on the Lake front as in the Latin
+Quarter. It may be a little different, but it's there.
+
+I went to Europe once myself. I was pretty raw when I left Chicago, and
+I was pretty sore when I got back. Coming and going I was simply sick.
+In London, for the first time in my life, I was taken for an easy
+thing. Every time I went into a store there was a bull movement. The
+clerks all knocked off their regular work and started in to mark up
+prices.
+
+They used to tell me that they didn't have any gold-brick men over
+there. So they don't. They deal in pictures--old masters, they call
+them. I bought two--you know the ones--those hanging in the waiting-room
+at the stock yards; and when I got back I found out that they had been
+painted by a measly little fellow who went to Paris to study art, after
+Bill Harris had found out that he was no good as a settling clerk. I
+keep 'em to remind myself that there's no fool like an old American fool
+when he gets this picture paresis.
+
+The fellow who tried to fit me out with a coat-of-arms didn't find me so
+easy. I picked mine when I first went into business for myself--a
+charging steer--and it's registered at Washington. It's my trade-mark,
+of course, and that's the only coat-of-arms an American merchant has any
+business with. It's penetrated to every quarter of the globe in the last
+twenty years, and every soldier in the world has carried it--in his
+knapsack.
+
+I take just as much pride in it as the fellow who inherits his and can't
+find any place to put it, except on his carriage door and his
+letter-head--and it's a heap more profitable. It's got so now that every
+jobber in the trade knows that it stands for good quality, and that's
+all any Englishman's coat-of-arms can stand for. Of course, an
+American's can't stand for anything much--generally it's the
+burned-in-the-skin brand of a snob.
+
+After the way some of the descendants of the old New York Dutchmen with
+the hoe and the English general storekeepers have turned out, I
+sometimes feel a little uneasy about what my great-grandchildren may
+do, but we'll just stick to the trade-mark and try to live up to it
+while the old man's in the saddle.
+
+I simply mention these things in a general way. I have no fears for you
+after you've been at work for a few years, and have struck an average
+between the packing-house and Harvard; then if you want to graze over a
+wider range it can't hurt you. But for the present you will find
+yourself pretty busy trying to get into the winning class.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +------------------------------+
+                  |            No. 5             |
+                  +------------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, head      |
+                  |  of the house of Graham &    |
+                  |  Co., at the Union Stock     |
+                  |  Yards in Chicago, to his    |
+                  |  son, Pierrepont Graham,     |
+                  |  at Lake Moosgatchemawamuc,  |
+                  |  in the Maine woods. Mr.     |
+                  |  Pierrepont has written to   |
+                  |  his father withdrawing      |
+                  |  his suggestion.             |
+                  +------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              V
+
+
+                                                     July 7, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ Yours of the fourth has the right ring, and it
+says more to the number of words used than any letter that I have ever
+received from you. I remember reading once that some fellows use
+language to conceal thought; but it's been my experience that a good
+many more use it _instead_ of thought.
+
+A business man's conversation should be regulated by fewer and simpler
+rules than any other function of the human animal. They are:
+
+Have something to say.
+
+Say it.
+
+Stop talking.
+
+Beginning before you know what you want to say and keeping on after you
+have said it lands a merchant in a lawsuit or the poorhouse, and the
+first is a short cut to the second. I maintain a legal department here,
+and it costs a lot of money, but it's to keep me from going to law.
+
+It's all right when you are calling on a girl or talking with friends
+after dinner to run a conversation like a Sunday-school excursion, with
+stops to pick flowers; but in the office your sentences should be the
+shortest distance possible between periods. Cut out the introduction and
+the peroration, and stop before you get to secondly. You've got to
+preach short sermons to catch sinners; and deacons won't believe they
+need long ones themselves. Give fools the first and women the last word.
+The meat's always in the middle of the sandwich. Of course, a little
+butter on either side of it doesn't do any harm if it's intended for a
+man who likes butter.
+
+Remember, too, that it's easier to look wise than to talk wisdom. Say
+less than the other fellow and listen more than you talk; for when a
+man's listening he isn't telling on himself and he's flattering the
+fellow who is. Give most men a good listener and most women enough
+note-paper and they'll tell all they know. Money talks--but not unless
+its owner has a loose tongue, and then its remarks are always offensive.
+Poverty talks, too, but nobody wants to hear what it has to say.
+
+I simply mention these things in passing because I'm afraid you're apt
+to be the fellow who's doing the talking; just as I'm a little afraid
+that you're sometimes like the hungry drummer at the dollar-a-day
+house--inclined to kill your appetite by eating the cake in the centre
+of the table before the soup comes on.
+
+Of course, I'm glad to see you swing into line and show the proper
+spirit about coming on here and going to work; but you mustn't get
+yourself all "het up" before you take the plunge, because you're bound
+to find the water pretty cold at first. I've seen a good many young
+fellows pass through and out of this office. The first week a lot of
+them go to work they're in a sweat for fear they'll be fired; and the
+second week for fear they won't be. By the third, a boy that's no good
+has learned just how little work he can do and keep his job; while the
+fellow who's got the right stuff in him is holding down his own place
+with one hand and beginning to reach for the job just ahead of him with
+the other. I don't mean that he's neglecting his work; but he's
+beginning to take notice, and that's a mighty hopeful sign in either a
+young clerk or a young widow.
+
+You've got to handle the first year of your business life about the way
+you would a trotting horse. Warm up a little before going to the
+post--not enough to be in a sweat, but just enough to be limber and
+eager. Never start off at a gait that you can't improve on, but move
+along strong and well in hand to the quarter. Let out a notch there, but
+take it calm enough up to the half not to break, and hard enough not to
+fall back into the ruck. At the three-quarters you ought to be going
+fast enough to poke your nose out of the other fellow's dust, and
+running like the Limited in the stretch. Keep your eyes to the front all
+the time, and you won't be so apt to shy at the little things by the
+side of the track. Head up, tail over the dashboard--that's the way the
+winners look in the old pictures of Maud S. and Dexter and Jay-Eye-See.
+And that's the way I want to see you swing by the old man at the end of
+the year, when we hoist the numbers of the fellows who are good enough
+to promote and pick out the salaries which need a little sweetening.
+
+I've always taken a good deal of stock in what you call "Blood-will-tell"
+if you're a Methodist, or "Heredity" if you're a Unitarian; and I don't
+want you to come along at this late day and disturb my religious beliefs.
+A man's love for his children and his pride are pretty badly snarled up
+in this world, and he can't always pick them apart. I think a heap of you
+and a heap of the house, and I want to see you get along well together.
+To do that you must start right. It's just as necessary to make a good
+first impression in business as in courting. You'll read a good deal about
+"love at first sight" in novels, and there may be something in it for all
+I know; but I'm dead certain there's no such thing as love at first sight
+in business. A man's got to keep company a long time, and come early and
+stay late and sit close, before he can get a girl or a job worth having.
+There's nothing comes without calling in this world, and after you've
+called you've generally got to go and fetch it yourself.
+
+Our bright young men have discovered how to make a pretty good article
+of potted chicken, and they don't need any help from hens, either; and
+you can smell the clover in our butterine if you've developed the poetic
+side of your nose; but none of the boys have been able to discover
+anything that will pass as a substitute for work, even in a
+boarding-house, though I'll give some of them credit for having tried
+pretty hard.
+
+[Illustration: "_Charlie Chase told me he was President of the Klondike
+Exploring, Gold Prospecting and Immigration Company._"]
+
+I remember when I was selling goods for old Josh Jennings, back in the
+sixties, and had rounded up about a thousand in a savings-bank--a mighty
+hard thousand, that came a dollar or so at a time, and every dollar with
+a little bright mark where I had bit it--I roomed with a dry-goods clerk
+named Charlie Chase. Charlie had a hankering to be a rich man; but
+somehow he could never see any connection between that hankering and his
+counter, except that he'd hint to me sometimes about an heiress who used
+to squander her father's money shamefully for the sake of having Charlie
+wait on her. But when it came to getting rich outside the dry-goods
+business and getting rich in a hurry, Charlie was the man.
+
+Along about Tuesday night--he was paid on Saturday--he'd stay at home
+and begin to scheme. He'd commence at eight o'clock and start a
+magazine, maybe, and before midnight he'd be turning away subscribers
+because his presses couldn't print a big enough edition. Or perhaps he
+wouldn't feel literary that night, and so he'd invent a system for
+speculating in wheat and go on pyramiding his purchases till he'd made
+the best that Cheops did look like a five-cent plate of ice cream. All
+he ever needed was a few hundred for a starter, and to get that he'd
+decide to let me in on the ground floor. I want to say right here that
+whenever any one offers to let you in on the ground floor it's a pretty
+safe rule to take the elevator to the roof garden. I never exactly
+refused to lend Charlie the capital he needed, but we generally
+compromised on half a dollar next morning, when he was in a hurry to
+make the store to keep from getting docked.
+
+He dropped by the office last week, a little bent and seedy, but all in
+a glow and trembling with excitement in the old way. Told me he was
+President of the Klondike Exploring, Gold Prospecting and Immigration
+Company, with a capital of ten millions. I guessed that he was the board
+of directors and the capital stock and the exploring and the prospecting
+and the immigrating, too--everything, in fact, except the business card
+he'd sent in; for Charlie always had a gift for nosing out printers
+who'd trust him. Said that for the sake of old times he'd let me have a
+few thousand shares at fifty cents, though they would go to par in a
+year. In the end we compromised on a loan of ten dollars, and Charlie
+went away happy.
+
+The swamps are full of razor-backs like Charlie, fellows who'd rather
+make a million a night in their heads than five dollars a day in cash.
+I have always found it cheaper to lend a man of that build a little money
+than to hire him. As a matter of fact, I have never known a fellow who
+was smart enough to think for the house days and for himself nights. A
+man who tries that is usually a pretty poor thinker, and he isn't much
+good to either; but if there's any choice the house gets the worst of
+it.
+
+I simply mention these little things in a general way. If you can take
+my word for some of them you are going to save yourself a whole lot of
+trouble. There are others which I don't speak of because life is too
+short and because it seems to afford a fellow a heap of satisfaction
+to pull the trigger for himself to see if it is loaded; and a lesson
+learned at the muzzle has the virtue of never being forgotten.
+
+You report to Milligan at the yards at eight sharp on the fifteenth.
+You'd better figure on being here on the fourteenth, because Milligan's
+a pretty touchy Irishman, and I may be able to give you a point or two
+that will help you to keep on his mellow side. He's apt to feel a little
+sore at taking on in his department a man whom he hasn't passed on.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |            No. 6            |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, en route |
+                  |  to Texas, to Pierrepont    |
+                  |  Graham, care of Graham &   |
+                  |  Co., Union Stock Yards,    |
+                  |  Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont    |
+                  |  has, entirely without      |
+                  |  intention, caused a little |
+                  |  confusion in the mails,    |
+                  |  and it has come to his     |
+                  |  father's notice in the     |
+                  |  course of business.        |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              VI
+
+
+                             PRIVATE CAR PARNASSUS, Aug. 15, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ Perhaps it's just as well that I had to hurry last
+night to make my train, and so had no time to tell you some things that
+are laying mighty heavy on my mind this morning.
+
+Jim Donnelly, of the Donnelly Provision Company, came into the office in
+the afternoon, with a fool grin on his fat face, to tell me that while
+he appreciated a note which he had just received in one of the firm's
+envelopes, beginning "Dearest," and containing an invitation to the
+theatre to-morrow night, it didn't seem to have any real bearing on his
+claim for shortage on the last carload of sweet pickled hams he had
+bought from us.
+
+Of course, I sent for Milligan and went for him pretty rough for having
+a mailing clerk so no-account as to be writing personal letters in
+office hours, and such a blunderer as to mix them up with the firm's
+correspondence. Milligan just stood there like a dumb Irishman and let
+me get through and go back and cuss him out all over again, with some
+trimmings that I had forgotten the first time, before he told me that
+you were the fellow who had made the bull. Naturally, I felt pretty
+foolish, and, while I tried to pass it off with something about your
+still being green and raw, the ice was mighty thin, and you had the
+old man running tiddledies.
+
+It didn't make me feel any sweeter about the matter to hear that when
+Milligan went for you, and asked what you supposed Donnelly would think
+of that sort of business, you told him to "consider the feelings of the
+girl who got our brutal refusal to allow a claim for a few hundredweight
+of hams."
+
+I haven't any special objection to your writing to girls and telling
+them that they are the real sugar-cured article, for, after all, if you
+overdo it, it's your breach-of-promise suit, but you must write before
+eight or after six. I have bought the stretch between those hours. Your
+time is money--my money--and when you take half an hour of it for your
+own purposes, that is just a petty form of petty larceny.
+
+Milligan tells me that you are quick to learn, and that you can do a
+powerful lot of work when you've a mind to; but he adds that it's mighty
+seldom your mind takes that particular turn. Your attention may be on
+the letters you are addressing, or you may be in a comatose condition
+mentally; he never quite knows until the returns come from the
+dead-letter office.
+
+A man can't have his head pumped out like a vacuum pan, or stuffed full
+of odds and ends like a bologna sausage, and do his work right. It
+doesn't make any difference how mean and trifling the thing he's doing
+may seem, that's the big thing and the only thing for him just then.
+Business is like oil--it won't mix with anything but business.
+
+You can resolve everything in the world, even a great fortune, into
+atoms. And the fundamental principles which govern the handling of
+postage stamps and of millions are exactly the same. They are the common
+law of business, and the whole practice of commerce is founded on them.
+They are so simple that a fool can't learn them; so hard that a lazy man
+won't.
+
+Boys are constantly writing me for advice about how to succeed, and when
+I send them my receipt they say that I am dealing out commonplace
+generalities. Of course I am, but that's what the receipt calls for, and
+if a boy will take these commonplace generalities and knead them into
+his job, the mixture'll be cake.
+
+[Illustration: "_Jim Donnelly of the Donnelly Provision Company came
+into my office with a fool grin on his fat face._"]
+
+Once a fellow's got the primary business virtues cemented into his
+character, he's safe to build on. But when a clerk crawls into the
+office in the morning like a sick setter pup, and leaps from his stool
+at night with the spring of a tiger, I'm a little afraid that if I sent
+him off to take charge of a branch house he wouldn't always be around
+when customers were. He's the sort of a chap who would hold back the sun
+an hour every morning and have it gain two every afternoon if the Lord
+would give him the same discretionary powers that He gave Joshua. And I
+have noticed that he's the fellow who invariably takes a timekeeper as an
+insult. He's pretty numerous in business offices; in fact, if the glance
+of the human eye could affect a clockface in the same way that a man's
+country cousins affect their city welcome, I should have to buy a new
+timepiece for the office every morning.
+
+I remember when I was a boy, we used to have a pretty lively
+camp-meeting every summer, and Elder Hoover, who was accounted a
+powerful exhorter in our parts, would wrastle with the sinners and the
+backsliders. There was one old chap in the town--Bill Budlong--who took
+a heap of pride in being the simon pure cuss. Bill was always the last
+man to come up to the mourners' bench at the camp-meeting and the first
+one to backslide when it was over. Used to brag around about what a
+hold Satan had on him and how his sin was the original brand, direct
+from Adam, put up in cans to keep, and the can-opener lost. Doc Hoover
+would get the whole town safe in the fold and then have to hold extra
+meetings for a couple of days to snake in that miserable Bill; but, in
+the end, he always got religion and got it hard. For a month or two
+afterward, he'd make the chills run down the backs of us children in
+prayer-meeting, telling how he had probably been the triflingest and
+orneriest man alive before he was converted. Then, along toward
+hog-killing time, he'd backslide, and go around bragging that he was
+standing so close to the mouth of the pit that his whiskers smelt of
+brimstone.
+
+He kept this up for about ten years, getting vainer and vainer of his
+staying qualities, until one summer, when the Elder had rounded up all
+the likeliest sinners in the bunch, he announced that the meetings were
+over for that year.
+
+You never saw a sicker-looking man than Bill when he heard that there
+wasn't going to be any extra session for him. He got up and said he
+reckoned another meeting would fetch him; that he sort of felt the
+clutch of old Satan loosening; but Doc Hoover was firm. Then Bill begged
+to have a special deacon told off to wrastle with him, but Doc wouldn't
+listen to that. Said he'd been wasting time enough on him for ten years
+to save a county, and he had just about made up his mind to let him try
+his luck by himself; that what he really needed more than religion was
+common-sense and a conviction that time in this world was too valuable
+to be frittered away. If he'd get that in his head he didn't think he'd
+be so apt to trifle with eternity; and if he didn't get it, religion
+wouldn't be of any special use to him.
+
+A big merchant finds himself in Doc Hoover's fix pretty often. There are
+too many likely young sinners in his office to make it worth while to
+bother long with the Bills. Very few men are worth wasting time on
+beyond a certain point, and that point is soon reached with a fellow who
+doesn't show any signs of wanting to help. Naturally, a green man always
+comes to a house in a pretty subordinate position, and it isn't possible
+to make so much noise with a firecracker as with a cannon. But you can
+tell a good deal by what there is left of the boy, when you come to
+inventory him on the fifth of July, whether he'll be safe to trust with
+a cannon next year.
+
+It isn't the little extra money that you may make for the house by
+learning the fundamental business virtues which counts so much as it is
+the effect that it has on your character and that of those about you,
+and especially on the judgment of the old man when he's casting around
+for the fellow to fill the vacancy just ahead of you. He's pretty apt to
+pick some one who keeps separate ledger accounts for work and for fun,
+who gives the house sixteen ounces to the pound, and, on general
+principles, to pass by the one who is late at the end where he ought to
+be early, and early at the end where he ought to be late.
+
+I simply mention these things in passing, but, frankly, I am afraid that
+you have a streak of the Bill in you; and you can't be a good clerk, let
+alone a partner, until you get it out. I try not to be narrow when I'm
+weighing up a young fellow, and to allow for soakage and leakage, and
+then to throw in a little for good feeling; but I don't trade with a
+man whom I find deliberately marking up the weights on me.
+
+This is a fine country we're running through, but it's a pity that it
+doesn't raise more hogs. It seems to take a farmer a long time to learn
+that the best way to sell his corn is on the hoof.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+P.S. I just had to allow Donnelly his claim on those hams, though I was
+dead sure our weights were right, and it cost the house sixty dollars.
+But your fool letter took all the snap out of our argument. I get hot
+every time I think of it.
+
+
+
+
+                  +------------------------------+
+                  |             No. 7            |
+                  +------------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at the    |
+                  |  Omaha Branch of Graham &    |
+                  |  Co., to Pierrepont Graham,  |
+                  |  at the Union Stock Yards,   |
+                  |  Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont     |
+                  |  hasn't found the methods    |
+                  |  of the worthy Milligan      |
+                  |  altogether to his liking,   |
+                  |  and he has commented        |
+                  |  rather freely on them.      |
+                  +------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              VII
+
+
+                                         OMAHA, September 1, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ Yours of the 30th ultimo strikes me all wrong.
+I don't like to hear you say that you can't work under Milligan or any
+other man, for it shows a fundamental weakness. And then, too, the house
+isn't interested in knowing how you like your boss, but in how he likes
+you.
+
+I understand all about Milligan. He's a cross, cranky old Irishman with
+a temper tied up in bow-knots, who prods his men with the bull-stick six
+days a week and schemes to get them salary raises on the seventh, when
+he ought to be listening to the sermon; who puts the black-snake on a
+clerk's hide when he sends a letter to Oshkosh that ought to go to
+Kalamazoo, and begs him off when the old man wants to have him fired for
+it. Altogether he's a hard, crabbed, generous, soft-hearted, loyal,
+bully old boy, who's been with the house since we took down the shutters
+for the first time, and who's going to stay with it till we put them up
+for the last time.
+
+But all that apart, you want to get it firmly fixed in your mind that
+you're going to have a Milligan over you all your life, and if it isn't
+a Milligan it will be a Jones or a Smith, and the chances are that
+you'll find them both harder to get along with than this old fellow. And
+if it isn't Milligan or Jones or Smith, and you ain't a butcher, but a
+parson or a doctor, or even the President of the United States, it'll be
+a way-back deacon, or the undertaker, or the machine. There isn't any
+such thing as being your own boss in this world unless you're a tramp,
+and then there's the constable.
+
+Like the old man if you can, but give him no cause to dislike you. Keep
+your self-respect at any cost, and your upper lip stiff at the same
+figure. Criticism can properly come only from above, and whenever you
+discover that your boss is no good you may rest easy that the man who
+pays his salary shares your secret. Learn to give back a bit from the
+base-burner, to let the village fathers get their feet on the fender and
+the sawdust box in range, and you'll find them making a little room for
+you in turn. Old men have tender feet, and apologies are poor salve for
+aching corns. Remember that when you're in the right you can afford to
+keep your temper, and that when you're in the wrong you can't afford to
+lose it.
+
+When you've got an uncertain cow it's all O.K. to tie a figure eight in
+her tail, if you ain't thirsty, and it's excitement you're after; but if
+you want peace and her nine quarts, you will naturally approach her from
+the side, and say, So-boss, in about the same tone that you would use if
+you were asking your best girl to let you hold her hand.
+
+Of course, you want to be sure of your natural history facts and learn
+to distinguish between a cow that's a kicker, but whose intentions are
+good if she's approached with proper respect, and a hooker, who is
+vicious on general principles, and any way you come at her. There's
+never any use fooling with an animal of that sort, brute or human. The
+only safe place is the other side of the fence or the top of the nearest
+tree.
+
+[Illustration: "_Bill Budlong was always the last man to come up to the
+mourners' bench._"]
+
+When I was clerking in Missouri, a fellow named Jeff Hankins moved down
+from Wisconsin and bought a little clearing just outside the town. Jeff
+was a good talker, but a bad listener, and so we learned a heap about
+how things were done in Wisconsin, but he didn't pick up much
+information about the habits of our Missouri fauna. When it came to
+cows, he had had a liberal education and he made out all right, but by
+and by it got on to ploughing time and Jeff naturally bought a mule--a
+little moth-eaten cuss, with sad, dreamy eyes and droopy, wiggly-woggly
+ears that swung in a circle as easy as if they ran on ball-bearings. Her
+owner didn't give her a very good character, but Jeff was too busy telling
+how much he knew about horses to pay much attention to what anybody was
+saying about mules. So finally the seller turned her loose in Jeff's lot,
+told him he wouldn't have any trouble catching her if he approached her
+right, and hurried off out of range.
+
+Next morning at sunup Jeff picked out a bridle and started off whistling
+Buffalo Gals--he was a powerful pretty whistler and could do the Mocking
+Bird with variations--to catch the mule and begin his plowing. The
+animal was feeding as peaceful as a water-color picture, and she didn't
+budge; but when Jeff began to get nearer, her ears dropped back along
+her neck as if they had lead in them. He knew that symptom and so he
+closed up kind of cautious, aiming for her at right angles and gurgling,
+"Muley, muley, here muley; that's a good muley," sort of soothing and
+caressing-like. Still she didn't stir and Jeff got right up to her and
+put one arm over her back and began to reach forward with the bridle,
+when something happened. He never could explain just what it was, but we
+judged from the marks on his person that the mule had reached forward
+and kicked the seat of his trousers with one of her prehensile hind
+feet; and had reached back and caught him on the last button of his
+waistcoat with one of her limber fore feet; and had twisted around her
+elastic neck and bit off a mouthful of his hair. When Jeff regained
+consciousness, he reckoned that the only really safe way to approach a
+mule was to drop on it from a balloon.
+
+I simply mention this little incident as an example of the fact that
+there are certain animals with which the Lord didn't intend white men to
+fool. And you will find that, as a rule, the human varieties of them are
+not the fellows who go for you rough-shod, like Milligan, when you're
+wrong. It's when you come across one of those gentlemen who have more
+oil in their composition than any two-legged animal has a right to have,
+that you should be on the lookout for concealed deadly weapons.
+
+I don't mean that you should distrust a man who is affable and
+approachable, but you want to learn to distinguish between him and one
+who is too affable and too approachable. The adverb makes the difference
+between a good and a bad fellow. The bunco men aren't all at the county
+fair, and they don't all operate with the little shells and the elusive
+pea. When a packer has learned all that there is to learn about
+quadrupeds, he knows only one-eighth of his business; the other
+seven-eighths, and the important seven-eighths, has to do with the study
+of bipeds.
+
+I dwell on this because I am a little disappointed that you should have
+made such a mistake in sizing up Milligan. He isn't the brightest man in
+the office, but he is loyal to me and to the house, and when you have
+been in business as long as I have you will be inclined to put a pretty
+high value on loyalty. It is the one commodity that hasn't any market
+value, and it's the one that you can't pay too much for. You can trust
+any number of men with your money, but mighty few with your reputation.
+Half the men who are with the house on pay day are against it the other
+six.
+
+A good many young fellows come to me looking for jobs, and start in by
+telling me what a mean house they have been working for; what a cuss to
+get along with the senior partner was; and how little show a bright,
+progressive clerk had with him. I never get very far with a critter of
+that class, because I know that he wouldn't like me or the house if he
+came to work for us.
+
+I don't know anything that a young business man ought to keep more
+entirely to himself than his dislikes, unless it is his likes. It's
+generally expensive to have either, but it's bankruptcy to tell about
+them. It's all right to say nothing about the dead but good, but it's
+better to apply the rule to the living, and especially to the house
+which is paying your salary.
+
+Just one word before I close, as old Doc Hoover used to say, when he was
+coming into the stretch, but still a good ways off from the benediction.
+I have noticed that you are inclined to be a little chesty and starchy
+around the office. Of course, it's good business, when a fellow hasn't
+much behind his forehead, to throw out his chest and attract attention
+to his shirt-front. But as you begin to meet the men who have done
+something that makes them worth meeting you will find that there are no
+"keep off the grass" or "beware of the dog" signs around their premises,
+and that they don't motion to the orchestra to play slow music while
+they talk.
+
+Superiority makes every man feel its equal. It is courtesy without
+condescension; affability without familiarity; self-sufficiency without
+selfishness; simplicity without snide. It weighs sixteen ounces to the
+pound without the package, and it doesn't need a four-colored label to
+make it go.
+
+We are coming home from here. I am a little disappointed in the showing
+that this house has been making. Pound for pound it is not getting
+nearly so much out of its hogs as we are in Chicago. I don't know just
+where the leak is, but if they don't do better next month I am coming
+back here with a shotgun, and there's going to be a pretty heavy
+mortality among our head men.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +------------------------------+
+                  |            No. 8             |
+                  +------------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at Hot    |
+                  |  Springs, Arkansas, to his   |
+                  |  son, Pierrepont, at the     |
+                  |  Union Stock Yards in        |
+                  |  Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont     |
+                  |  has just been promoted      |
+                  |  from the mailing to the     |
+                  |  billing desk and, in        |
+                  |  consequence, his father     |
+                  |  is feeling rather "mellow"  |
+                  |  toward him.                 |
+                  +------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              VIII
+
+
+                                    HOT SPRINGS, January 15, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ They've run me through the scalding vats here till
+they've pretty nearly taken all the hair off my hide, but that or
+something else has loosened up my joints so that they don't squeak any
+more when I walk. The doctor says he'll have my rheumatism cured in
+thirty days, so I guess you can expect me home in about a fortnight. For
+he's the breed of doctor that is always two weeks ahead of his patients'
+condition when they're poor, and two weeks behind it when they're rich.
+He calls himself a specialist, which means that it costs me ten dollars
+every time he has a look in at my tongue, against two that I would pay
+the family doctor for gratifying his curiosity. But I guess this
+specialist business is about the only outlet for marketing the surplus
+of young doctors.
+
+Reminds me of the time when we were piling up canned corned beef in
+stock faster than people would eat it, and a big drought happened along
+in Texas and began driving the canners in to the packing-house quicker
+than we could tuck them away in tin. Jim Durham tried to "stimulate the
+consumption," as he put it, by getting out a nice little booklet called,
+"A Hundred Dainty Dishes from a Can," and telling how to work off corned
+beef on the family in various disguises; but, after he had schemed out
+ten different combinations, the other ninety turned out to be corned-beef
+hash. So that was no use.
+
+But one day we got together and had a nice, fancy, appetizing label
+printed, and we didn't economize on the gilt--a picture of a steer so
+fat that he looked as if he'd break his legs if they weren't shored up
+pretty quick with props, and with blue ribbons tied to his horns. We
+labeled it "Blue Ribbon Beef--For Fancy Family Trade," and charged an
+extra ten cents a dozen for the cans on which that special label was
+pasted. Of course, people just naturally wanted it.
+
+There's nothing helps convince some men that a thing has merit like a
+little gold on the label. And it's pretty safe to bet that if a fellow
+needs a six or seven-syllabled word to describe his profession, he's a
+corn doctor when you come to look him up in the dictionary. And then
+you'll generally find him in the back part of the book where they tuck
+away the doubtful words.
+
+But that isn't what I started out to say. I want to tell you that I was
+very, very glad to learn from your letter that you had been promoted to
+the billing desk. I have felt all along that when you got a little of
+the nonsense tried out of you there would be a residue of common-sense,
+and I am glad to have your boss back up my judgment. There's two things
+you just naturally don't expect from human nature--that the widow's
+tombstone estimate of the departed, on which she is trying to convince
+the neighbors against their better judgment that he went to Heaven, and
+the father's estimate of the son, on which he is trying to pass him
+along into a good salary, will be conservative.
+
+I had that driven into my mind and spiked down when I hired the widow's
+son a few years ago. His name was Clarence--Clarence St. Clair
+Hicks--and his father used to keep books for me when he wasn't picking
+the winners at Washington Park or figuring out the batting averages of
+the Chicagos. He was one of those quick men who always have their books
+posted up half an hour before closing time for three weeks of the month,
+and spend the evenings of the fourth hunting up the eight cents that
+they are out on the trial balance. When he died his wife found that his
+life insurance had lapsed the month before, and so she brought Clarence
+down to the office and asked me to give him a job.
+
+Clarence wasn't exactly a pretty boy; in fact, he looked to me like
+another of his father's bad breaks; but his mother seemed to think a
+heap of him. I learned that he would have held the belt in his
+Sunday-school for long-distance verse-reciting if the mother of one of
+the other boys hadn't fixed the superintendent, and that it had taken a
+general conspiracy of the teachers in his day-school to keep him from
+walking off with the good-conduct medal.
+
+I couldn't just reconcile those statements with Clarence's face, but I
+accepted him at par and had him passed along to the head errand boy. His
+mother cried a little when she saw him marched off, and asked me to see
+that he was treated kindly and wasn't bullied by the bigger boys,
+because he had been "raised a pet."
+
+A number of unusual things happened in the offices that morning, and the
+head office boy thought Clarence might be able to explain some of them,
+but he had an alibi ready every time--even when a bookkeeper found the
+vault filled with cigarette smoke and Clarence in it hunting for
+something he couldn't describe. But as he was a new boy, no one was
+disposed to bear down on him very hard, so his cigarettes were taken
+away from him and he was sent back to his bench with a warning that he
+had used up all his explanations.
+
+Along toward noon, a big Boston customer came in with his little boy--a
+nice, plump, stall-fed youngster, with black velvet pants and hair that
+was just a little longer than was safe in the stock-yards district. And
+while we were talking business, the kid wandered off to the coat-room,
+where the errand boys were eating lunch, which was a pretty desperate
+place for a boy with velvet pants on to go.
+
+[Illustration: "_Clarence looked to me like another of his father's bad
+breaks._"]
+
+As far as we could learn from Willie when he came out of his
+convulsions, the boys had been very polite to him and had insisted on
+his joining in a new game which Clarence had just invented, called
+playing pig-sticker. And, because he was company, Clarence told him that
+he could be the pig. Willie didn't know just what being the pig meant,
+but, as he told his father, it didn't sound very nice and he was afraid
+he wouldn't like it. So he tried to pass along the honor to some one
+else, but Clarence insisted that it was "hot stuff to be the pig," and
+before Willie could rightly judge what was happening to him, one end of
+a rope had been tied around his left ankle and the other end had been
+passed over a transom bar, and he was dangling headforemost in the air,
+while Clarence threatened his jugular with a lath sword. That was when
+he let out the yell which brought his father and me on the jump and
+scattered the boys all over the stock yards.
+
+Willie's father canceled his bologna contract and marched off muttering
+something about "degrading surroundings brutalizing the young;" and
+Clarence's mother wrote me that I was a bad old man who had held her
+husband down all his life and now wouldn't give her son a show. For,
+naturally, after that little incident, I had told the boy who had been
+raised a pet that he had better go back to the menagerie.
+
+I simply mention Clarence in passing as an instance of why I am a little
+slow to trust my judgment on my own. I have always found that, whenever
+I thought a heap of anything I owned, there was nothing like getting the
+other fellow's views expressed in figures; and the other fellow is
+usually a pessimist when he's buying. The lady on the dollar is the only
+woman who hasn't any sentiment in her make-up. And if you really want a
+look at the solid facts of a thing you must strain off the sentiment
+first.
+
+I put you under Milligan to get a view of you through his eyes. If he
+says that you are good enough to be a billing clerk, and to draw twelve
+dollars a week, I guess there's no doubt about it. For he's one of
+those men that never show any real enthusiasm except when they're
+cussing.
+
+Naturally, it's a great satisfaction to see a streak or two of business
+ability beginning to show under the knife, because when it comes closing
+time for me it will make it a heap easier to know that some one who
+bears the name will take down the shutters in the morning.
+
+Boys are a good deal like the pups that fellows sell on street
+corners--they don't always turn out as represented. You buy a likely
+setter pup and raise a spotted coach dog from it, and the promising son
+of an honest butcher is just as like as not to turn out a poet or a
+professor. I want to say in passing that I have no real prejudice
+against poets, but I believe that, if you're going to be a Milton,
+there's nothing like being a mute, inglorious one, as some fellow who
+was a little sore on the poetry business once put it. Of course, a
+packer who understands something about the versatility of cottonseed
+oil need never turn down orders for lard because the run of hogs is
+light, and a father who understands human nature can turn out an
+imitation parson from a boy whom the Lord intended to go on the Board of
+Trade. But on general principles it's best to give your cottonseed oil a
+Latin name and to market it on its merits, and to let your boy follow
+his bent, even if it leads him into the wheat pit. If a fellow has got
+poetry in him it's bound to come out sooner or later in the papers or
+the street cars; and the longer you keep it bottled up the harder it
+comes, and the longer it takes the patient to recover. There's no easier
+way to cure foolishness than to give a man leave to be foolish. And the
+only way to show a fellow that he's chosen the wrong business is to let
+him try it. If it really is the wrong thing you won't have to argue with
+him to quit, and if it isn't you haven't any right to.
+
+Speaking of bull-pups that turned out to be terriers naturally calls to
+mind the case of my old friend Jeremiah Simpkins' son. There isn't a
+solider man in the Boston leather trade than Jeremiah, nor a bigger
+scamp that the law can't touch than his son Ezra. There isn't an ounce
+of real meanness in Ezra's whole body, but he's just naturally and
+unintentionally a maverick. When he came out of college his father
+thought that a few years' experience in the hide department of Graham &
+Co. would be a good thing for him before he tackled the leather
+business. So I wrote to send him on and I would give him a job,
+supposing, of course, that I was getting a yearling of the steady, old,
+reliable Simpkins strain.
+
+I was a little uneasy when Ezra reported, because he didn't just look
+as if he had had a call to leather. He was a tall, spare New Englander,
+with one of those knobby foreheads which has been pushed out by the
+overcrowding of the brain, or bulged by the thickening of the skull,
+according as you like or dislike the man. His manners were easy or
+familiar by the same standard. He told me right at the start that, while
+he didn't know just what he wanted to do, he was dead sure that it
+wasn't the leather business. It seemed that he had said the same thing
+to his father and that the old man had answered, "Tut, tut," and told
+him to forget it and to learn hides.
+
+Simpkins learned all that he wanted to know about the packing industry
+in thirty days, and I learned all that I wanted to know about Ezra in
+the same time. Pork-packing seemed to be the only thing that he wasn't
+interested in. I got his resignation one day just five minutes before
+the one which I was having written out for him was ready; for I will do
+Simpkins the justice to say that there was nothing slow about him. He
+and his father split up, temporarily, over it, and, of course, it cost
+me the old man's trade and friendship. I want to say right here that the
+easiest way in the world to make enemies is to hire friends.
+
+I lost sight of Simpkins for a while, and then he turned up at the
+office one morning as friendly and familiar as ever. Said he was a
+reporter and wanted to interview me on the December wheat deal. Of
+course, I wouldn't talk on that, but I gave him a little fatherly
+advice--told him he would sleep in a hall bedroom all his life if he
+didn't quit his foolishness and go back to his father, though I didn't
+really believe it. He thanked me and went off and wrote a column about
+what I might have said about December wheat, and somehow gave the
+impression that I had said it.
+
+The next I heard of Simpkins he was dead. The Associated Press
+dispatches announced it, the Cuban Junta confirmed it, and last of all,
+a long dispatch from Simpkins himself detailed the circumstances leading
+up to the "atrocity," as the headlines in his paper called it.
+
+I got a long wire from Ezra's father asking me to see the managing editor
+and get at the facts for him. It seemed that the paper had thought a heap
+of Simpkins, and that he had been sent out to Cuba as a correspondent, and
+stationed with the Insurgent army. Simpkins in Cuba had evidently lived up
+to the reputation of Simpkins in Chicago. When there was any news he sent
+it, and when there wasn't he just made news and sent that along.
+
+The first word of his death had come in his own letter, brought across
+on a filibustering steamer and wired on from Jacksonville. It told, with
+close attention to detail--something he had learned since he left
+me--how he had strayed away from the little band of insurgents with
+which he had been out scouting and had blundered into the Spanish lines.
+He had been promptly made a prisoner, and, despite his papers proving
+his American citizenship, and the nature of his job, and the red cross
+on his sleeve, he had been tried by drumhead court martial and sentenced
+to be shot at dawn. All this he had written out, and then, that his
+account might be complete, he had gone on and imagined his own
+execution. This was written in a sort of pigeon, or perhaps you would
+call it black Spanish, English, and let on to be the work of the
+eyewitness to whom Simpkins had confided his letter. He had been the
+sentry over the prisoner, and for a small bribe in hand and the promise
+of a larger one from the paper, he had turned his back on Simpkins while
+he wrote out the story, and afterward had deserted and carried it to the
+Cuban lines.
+
+The account ended: "Then, as the order to fire was given by the
+lieutenant, Señor Simpkins raised his eyes toward Heaven and cried: 'I
+protest in the name of my American citizenship!'" At the end of the
+letter, and not intended for publication, was scrawled: "This is a bully
+scoop for you, boys, but it's pretty tough on me. Good-by. Simpkins."
+
+The managing editor dashed a tear from his eye when he read this to me,
+and gulped a little as he said: "I can't help it; he was such a d----d
+thoughtful boy. Why, he even remembered to inclose descriptions for the
+pictures!"
+
+Simpkins' last story covered the whole of the front page and three
+columns of the second, and it just naturally sold cords of papers. His
+editor demanded that the State Department take it up, though the
+Spaniards denied the execution or any previous knowledge of any such
+person as this Señor Simpkins. That made another page in the paper, of
+course, and then they got up a memorial service, which was good for
+three columns. One of those fellows that you can find in every office,
+who goes around and makes the boys give up their lunch money to buy
+flowers for the deceased aunt of the cellar boss' wife, managed to
+collect twenty dollars among our clerks, and they sent a floral
+notebook, with "Gone to Press," done in blue immortelles on the cover,
+as their "tribute."
+
+I put on a plug hat and attended the service out of respect for his
+father. But I had hardly got back to the office before I received a wire
+from Jamaica, reading: "Cable your correspondent here let me have
+hundred. Notify father all hunk. Keep it dark from others. Simpkins."
+
+I kept it dark and Ezra came back to life by easy stages and in such a
+way as not to attract any special attention to himself. He managed to
+get the impression around that he'd been snatched from the jaws of death
+by a rescue party at the last moment. The last I heard of him he was in
+New York and drawing ten thousand a year, which was more than he could
+have worked up to in the leather business in a century.
+
+Fifty or a hundred years ago, when there was good money in poetry, a man
+with Simpkins' imagination would naturally have been a bard, as I
+believe they used to call the top-notchers; and, once he was turned
+loose to root for himself, he instinctively smelled out the business
+where he could use a little poetic license and made a hit in it.
+
+When a pup has been born to point partridges there's no use trying to
+run a fox with him. I was a little uncertain about you at first, but I
+guess the Lord intended you to hunt with the pack. Get the scent in your
+nostrils and keep your nose to the ground, and don't worry too much
+about the end of the chase. The fun of the thing's in the run and not in
+the finish.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 9             |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at Hot   |
+                  |  Springs, Arkansas, to his  |
+                  |  son, Pierrepont, at the    |
+                  |  Union Stock Yards in       |
+                  |  Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont    |
+                  |  has been investing more    |
+                  |  heavily in roses than his  |
+                  |  father thinks his means    |
+                  |  warrant, and he tries to   |
+                  |  turn his thoughts to       |
+                  |  staple groceries.          |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              IX
+
+
+                                    HOT SPRINGS, January 30, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ I knew right off that I had made a mistake when I
+opened the inclosed and saw that it was a bill for fifty-two dollars,
+"for roses sent, as per orders, to Miss Mabel Dashkam." I don't just
+place Miss Dashkam, but if she's the daughter of old Job Dashkam, on the
+open Board, I should say, on general principles, that she was a fine
+girl to let some other fellow marry. The last time I saw her, she
+inventoried about $10,000 as she stood--allowing that her diamonds would
+scratch glass--and that's more capital than any woman has a right to tie
+up on her back, I don't care how rich her father is. And Job's fortune
+is one of that brand which foots up to a million in the newspapers and
+leaves the heirs in debt to the lawyers who settle the estate.
+
+Of course I've never had any real experience in this sparking business,
+except with your Ma; but I've watched from the other side of the fence
+while a heap of fellows were getting it, and I should say that marrying
+a woman like Mabel Dashkam would be the first step toward becoming a
+grass widower. I'll bet if you'll tell her you're making twelve a week
+and ain't going to get any more till you earn it, you'll find that you
+can't push within a mile of her even on a Soo ice-breaker. She's one of
+those women with a heart like a stock-ticker--it doesn't beat over
+anything except money.
+
+Of course you're in no position yet to think of being engaged even, and
+that's why I'm a little afraid that you may be planning to get married.
+But a twelve-dollar clerk, who owes fifty-two dollars for roses, needs a
+keeper more than a wife. I want to say right here that there always
+comes a time to the fellow who blows fifty-two dollars at a lick on
+roses when he thinks how many staple groceries he could have bought
+with the money. After all, there's no fool like a young fool, because
+in the nature of things he's got a long time to live.
+
+I suppose I'm fanning the air when I ask you to be guided by my judgment
+in this matter, because, while a young fellow will consult his father
+about buying a horse, he's cock-sure of himself when it comes to picking
+a wife. Marriages may be made in Heaven, but most engagements are made
+in the back parlor with the gas so low that a fellow doesn't really get
+a square look at what he's taking. While a man doesn't see much of a
+girl's family when he's courting, he's apt to see a good deal of it when
+he's housekeeping; and while he doesn't marry his wife's father, there's
+nothing in the marriage vow to prevent the old man from borrowing money
+of him, and you can bet if he's old Job Dashkam he'll do it. A man can't
+pick his own mother, but he can pick his son's mother, and when he
+chooses a father-in-law who plays the bucket shops, he needn't be
+surprised if his own son plays the races.
+
+Never marry a poor girl who's been raised like a rich one. She's simply
+traded the virtues of the poor for the vices of the rich without going
+long on their good points. To marry for money or to marry without money
+is a crime. There's no real objection to marrying a woman with a
+fortune, but there is to marrying a fortune with a woman. Money makes
+the mare go, and it makes her cut up, too, unless she's used to it and
+you drive her with a snaffle-bit.
+
+While you are at it, there's nothing like picking out a good-looking
+wife, because even the handsomest woman looks homely sometimes, and so
+you get a little variety; but a homely one can only look worse than
+usual. Beauty is only skin deep, but that's deep enough to satisfy any
+reasonable man. (I want to say right here that to get any sense out of a
+proverb I usually find that I have to turn it wrong side out.) Then,
+too, if a fellow's bound to marry a fool, and a lot of men have to if
+they're going to hitch up into a well-matched team, there's nothing like
+picking a good-looking one.
+
+I simply mention these things in a general way, because it seems to me,
+from the gait at which you're starting off, that you'll likely find
+yourself roped and branded any day, without quite knowing how it
+happened, and I want you to understand that the girl who marries you for
+my money is getting a package of green goods in more ways than one. I
+think, though, if you really understood what marrying on twelve a week
+meant, you would have bought a bedroom set instead of roses with that
+fifty-two you owe.
+
+Speaking of marrying the old man's money by proxy naturally takes me
+back to my old town in Missouri and the case of Chauncey Witherspoon
+Hoskins. Chauncey's father was the whole village, barring the railroad
+station and the saloon, and, of course, Chauncey thought that he was
+something of a pup himself. So he was, but not just the kind that
+Chauncey thought he was. He stood about five foot three in his pumps,
+had a nice pinky complexion, pretty wavy hair, and a curly mustache. All
+he needed was a blue ribbon around his neck to make you call, "Here,
+Fido," when he came into the room.
+
+Still I believe he must have been pretty popular with the ladies,
+because I can't think of him to this day without wanting to punch his
+head. At the church sociables he used to hop around among them, chipping
+and chirping like a dicky-bird picking up seed; and he was a great hand
+to play the piano, and sing saddish, sweetish songs to them. Always said
+the smooth thing and said it easy. Never had to choke and swallow to
+fetch it up. Never stepped through his partner's dress when he began to
+dance, or got flustered when he brought her refreshments and poured the
+coffee in her lap to cool instead of in the saucer. We boys who
+couldn't walk across the floor without feeling that our pants had hiked
+up till they showed our feet to the knees, and that we were carrying a
+couple of canvased hams where our hands ought to be, didn't like him;
+but the girls did. You can trust a woman's taste on everything except
+men; and it's mighty lucky that she slips up there or we'd pretty nigh
+all be bachelors. I might add that you can't trust a man's taste on
+women, either, and that's pretty lucky, too, because there are a good
+many old maids in the world as it is.
+
+One time or another Chauncey lolled in the best room of every house in
+our town, and we used to wonder how he managed to browse up and down the
+streets that way without getting into the pound. I never found out till
+after I married your Ma, and she told me Chauncey's heart secrets. It
+really wasn't violating any confidence, because he'd told them to every
+girl in town.
+
+Seems he used to get terribly sad as soon as he was left alone with a
+girl and began to hint about a tragedy in his past--something that had
+blighted his whole life and left him without the power to love
+again--and lots more slop from the same pail.
+
+Of course, every girl in that town had known Chauncey since he wore
+short pants, and ought to have known that the nearest to a tragedy he
+had ever been was when he sat in the top gallery of a Chicago theatre
+and saw a lot of barnstormers play Othello. But some people, and
+especially very young people, don't think anything's worth believing
+unless it's hard to believe.
+
+Chauncey worked along these lines until he was twenty-four, and then he
+made a mistake. Most of the girls that he had grown up with had married
+off, and while he was waiting for a new lot to come along, he began to
+shine up to the widow Sharpless, a powerful, well-preserved woman of
+forty or thereabouts, who had been born with her eye-teeth cut. He
+found her uncommon sympathetic. And when Chauncey finally came out of
+his trance he was the stepfather of the widow's four children.
+
+She was very kind to Chauncey, and treated him like one of her own sons;
+but she was very, very firm. There was no gallivanting off alone, and
+when they went out in double harness strangers used to annoy him
+considerable by patting him on the head and saying to his wife: "What a
+bright-looking chap your son is, Mrs. Hoskins!"
+
+She was almost seventy when Chauncey buried her a while back, and they
+say that he began to take notice again on the way home from the funeral.
+Anyway, he crowded his mourning into sixty days--and I reckon there was
+plenty of room in them to hold all his grief without stretching--and his
+courting into another sixty. And four months after date he presented his
+matrimonial papers for acceptance. Said he was tired of this
+mother-and-son foolishness, and wasn't going to leave any room for doubt
+this time. Didn't propose to have people sizing his wife up for one of
+his ancestors any more. So he married Lulu Littlebrown, who was just
+turned eighteen. Chauncey was over fifty then, and wizened up like a
+late pippin that has been out overnight in an early frost.
+
+He took Lu to Chicago for the honeymoon, and Mose Greenebaum, who happened
+to be going up to town for his fall goods, got into the parlor car with
+them. By and by the porter came around and stopped beside Chauncey.
+
+"Wouldn't your daughter like a pillow under her head?" says he.
+
+Chauncey just groaned. Then--"Git; you Senegambian son of darkness!" And
+the porter just naturally got.
+
+Mose had been taking it all in, and now he went back to the smoking-room
+and passed the word along to the drummers there. Every little while one
+of them would lounge up the aisle to Chauncey and ask if he couldn't
+lend his daughter a magazine, or give her an orange, or bring her a
+drink. And the language that he gave back in return for these courtesies
+wasn't at all fitting in a bridegroom. Then Mose had another happy
+thought, and dropped off at a way station and wired the clerk at the
+Palmer House.
+
+When they got to the hotel the clerk was on the lookout for them, and
+Chauncey hadn't more than signed his name before he reached out over his
+diamond and said: "Ah, Mr. Hoskins; would you like to have your daughter
+near you?"
+
+I simply mention Chauncey in passing as an example of the foolishness of
+thinking you can take any chances with a woman who has really decided
+that she wants to marry, or that you can average up matrimonial
+mistakes. And I want you to remember that marrying the wrong girl is
+the one mistake that you've got to live with all your life. I think,
+though, that if you tell Mabel what your assets are, she'll decide she
+won't be your particular mistake.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 10           |
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at the  |
+                  |  Union Stock Yards in      |
+                  |  Chicago, to his son,      |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at the        |
+                  |  Commercial House,         |
+                  |  Jeffersonville, Indiana.  |
+                  |  Mr. Pierrepont has been   |
+                  |  promoted to the position  |
+                  |  of traveling salesman     |
+                  |  for the house, and has    |
+                  |  started out on the road.  |
+                  +----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              X
+
+
+                                           CHICAGO, March 1, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ When I saw you start off yesterday I was just a
+little uneasy; for you looked so blamed important and chesty that I am
+inclined to think you will tell the first customer who says he doesn't
+like our sausage that he knows what he can do about it. Repartee makes
+reading lively, but business dull. And what the house needs is more
+orders.
+
+Sausage is the one subject of all others that a fellow in the packing
+business ought to treat solemnly. Half the people in the world take a
+joke seriously from the start, and the other half if you repeat it often
+enough. Only last week the head of our sausage department started to put
+out a tin-tag brand of frankfurts, but I made him take it off the market
+quicker than lightning, because I knew that the first fool who saw the
+tin-tag would ask if that was the license. And, though people would
+grin a little at first, they'd begin to look serious after a while; and
+whenever the butcher tried to sell them our brand they'd imagine they
+heard the bark, and ask for "that real country sausage" at twice as much
+a pound.
+
+He laughs best who doesn't laugh at all when he's dealing with the
+public. It has been my experience that, even when a man has a sense of
+humor, it only really carries him to the point where he will join in a
+laugh at the expense of the other fellow. There's nothing in the world
+sicker-looking than the grin of the man who's trying to join in heartily
+when the laugh's on him, and to pretend that he likes it.
+
+Speaking of sausage with a registered pedigree calls to mind a little
+experience that I had last year. A fellow came into the office here with
+a shriveled-up toy spaniel, one of those curly, hairy little fellows
+that a woman will kiss, and then grumble because a fellow's mustache
+tickles. Said he wanted to sell him. I wasn't really disposed to add a dog
+to my troubles, but on general principles I asked him what he wanted for
+the little cuss.
+
+[Illustration: "_You looked so blamed important and chesty when you
+started off._"]
+
+The fellow hawed and choked and wiped away a tear. Finally, he fetched
+out that he loved the dog like a son, and that it broke his heart to
+think of parting with him; that he wouldn't dare look Dandy in the face
+after he had named the price he was asking for him, and that it was the
+record-breaking, marked-down sacrifice sale of the year on dogs; that it
+wasn't really money he was after, but a good home for the little chap.
+Said that I had a rather pleasant face and he knew that he could trust
+me to treat Dandy kindly; so--as a gift--he would let me have him for
+five hundred.
+
+"Cents?" says I.
+
+"Dollars," says he, without blinking.
+
+"It ought to be a mastiff at that price," says I.
+
+"If you thought more of quality," says he, in a tone of sort of
+dignified reproof, "and less of quantity, your brand would enjoy a
+better reputation."
+
+I was pretty hot, I can tell you, but I had laid myself open, so I just
+said: "The sausage business is too poor to warrant our paying any such
+price for light-weights. Bring around a bigger dog and then we'll talk;"
+but the fellow only shook his head sadly, whistled to Dandy, and walked
+off.
+
+I simply mention this little incident as an example of the fact that
+when a man cracks a joke in the Middle Ages he's apt to affect the
+sausage market in the Nineteenth Century, and to lay open an honest
+butcher to the jeers of every dog-stealer in the street. There's such a
+thing as carrying a joke too far, and the fellow who keeps on pretending
+to believe that he's paying for pork and getting dog is pretty apt to
+get dog in the end.
+
+But all that aside, I want you to get it firmly fixed in your mind right
+at the start that this trip is only an experiment, and that I am not at
+all sure you were cut out by the Lord to be a drummer. But you can
+figure on one thing--that you will never become the pride of the pond by
+starting out to cut figure eights before you are firm on your skates.
+
+A real salesman is one-part talk and nine-parts judgment; and he uses
+the nine-parts of judgment to tell when to use the one-part of talk.
+Goods ain't sold under Marquess of Queensberry rules any more, and
+you'll find that knowing how many rounds the Old 'Un can last against
+the Boiler-Maker won't really help you to load up the junior partner
+with our Corn-fed brand hams.
+
+A good many salesmen have an idea that buyers are only interested in
+baseball, and funny stories, and Tom Lipton, and that business is a side
+line with them; but as a matter of fact mighty few men work up to the
+position of buyer through giving up their office hours to listening to
+anecdotes. I never saw one that liked a drummer's jokes more than an
+eighth of a cent a pound on a tierce of lard. What the house really
+sends you out for is orders.
+
+Of course, you want to be nice and mellow with the trade, but always
+remember that mellowness carried too far becomes rottenness. You can buy
+some fellows with a cheap cigar and some with a cheap compliment, and
+there's no objection to giving a man what he likes, though I never knew
+smoking to do anything good except a ham, or flattery to help any one
+except to make a fool of himself.
+
+Real buyers ain't interested in much besides your goods and your prices.
+Never run down your competitor's brand to them, and never let them run
+down yours. Don't get on your knees for business, but don't hold your
+nose so high in the air that an order can travel under it without your
+seeing it. You'll meet a good many people on the road that you won't
+like, but the house needs their business.
+
+Some fellows will tell you that we play the hose on our dry salt meat
+before we ship it, and that it shrinks in transit like a Baxter Street
+Jew's all-wool suits in a rainstorm; that they wonder how we manage to
+pack solid gristle in two-pound cans without leaving a little meat
+hanging to it; and that the last car of lard was so strong that it came
+back of its own accord from every retailer they shipped it to. The first
+fellow will be lying, and the second will be exaggerating, and the third
+may be telling the truth. With him you must settle on the spot; but
+always remember that a man who's making a claim never underestimates his
+case, and that you can generally compromise for something less than the
+first figure. With the second you must sympathize, and say that the
+matter will be reported to headquarters and the boss of the canning-room
+called up on the carpet and made to promise that it will never happen
+again. With the first you needn't bother. There's no use feeding expensive
+"hen food" to an old Dominick that sucks eggs. The chances are that the
+car weighed out more than it was billed, and that the fellow played the
+hose on it himself and added a thousand pounds of cheap salt before he
+jobbed it out to his trade.
+
+Where you're going to slip up at first is in knowing which is which, but
+if you don't learn pretty quick you'll not travel very far for the
+house. For your own satisfaction I will say right here that you may know
+you are in a fair way of becoming a good drummer by three things:
+
+First--When you send us Orders.
+
+Second--More Orders.
+
+Third--Big Orders.
+
+If you do this you won't have a great deal of time to write long
+letters, and we won't have a great deal of time to read them, for we
+will be very, very busy here making and shipping the goods. We aren't
+specially interested in orders that the other fellow gets, or in knowing
+how it happened after it has happened. If you like life on the road you
+simply won't let it happen. So just send us your address every day and
+your orders. They will tell us all that we want to know about "the
+situation."
+
+I was cured of sending information to the house when I was very, very
+young--in fact, on the first trip which I made on the road. I was
+traveling out of Chicago for Hammer & Hawkins, wholesale dry-goods,
+gents' furnishings and notions. They started me out to round up trade in
+the river towns down Egypt ways, near Cairo.
+
+I hadn't more than made my first town and sized up the population before
+I began to feel happy, because I saw that business ought to be very good
+there. It appeared as if everybody in that town needed something in my
+line. The clerk of the hotel where I registered wore a dicky and his
+cuffs were tied to his neck by pieces of string run up his sleeves, and
+most of the merchants on Main Street were in their shirt-sleeves--at
+least those that had shirts were--and so far as I could judge there
+wasn't a whole pair of galluses among them. Some were using wire, some a
+little rope, and others just faith--buckled extra tight. Pride of the
+Prairie XXX flour sacks seemed to be the nobby thing in boys' suitings
+there. Take it by and large, if ever there was a town which looked as if
+it had a big, short line of dry-goods, gents' furnishings and notions to
+cover, it was that one.
+
+But when I caught the proprietor of the general store during a lull in
+the demand for navy plug, he wouldn't even look at my samples, and when
+I began to hint that the people were pretty ornery dressers he reckoned
+that he "would paste me one if I warn't so young." Wanted to know what I
+meant by coming swelling around in song-and-dance clothes and getting
+funny at the expense of people who made their living honestly. Allowed
+that when it came to a humorous get-up my clothes were the original
+end-man's gag.
+
+I noticed on the way back to the hotel that every fellow holding up a
+hitching-post was laughing, and I began to look up and down the street
+for the joke, not understanding at first that the reason why I couldn't
+see it was because I was it. Right there I began to learn that, while
+the Prince of Wales may wear the correct thing in hats, it's safer when
+you're out of his sphere of influence to follow the styles that the
+hotel clerk sets; that the place to sell clothes is in the city, where
+every one seems to have plenty of them; and that the place to sell mess
+pork is in the country, where every one keeps hogs. That is why when a
+fellow comes to me for advice about moving to a new country, where there
+are more opportunities, I advise him--if he is built right--to go to an
+old city where there is more money.
+
+I wrote in to the house pretty often on that trip, explaining how it
+was, going over the whole situation very carefully, and telling what our
+competitors were doing, wherever I could find that they were doing
+anything.
+
+I gave old Hammer credit for more curiosity than he possessed, because
+when I reached Cairo I found a telegram from him reading: "_Know what
+our competitors are doing: they are getting all the trade. But what are
+you doing?_" I saw then that the time for explaining was gone and that
+the moment for resigning had arrived; so I just naturally sent in my
+resignation. That is what we will expect from you--or orders.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 11            |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at the   |
+                  |  Union Stock Yards in       |
+                  |  Chicago, to his son,       |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at The         |
+                  |  Planters' Palace Hotel,    |
+                  |  at Big Gap, Kentucky. Mr.  |
+                  |  Pierrepont's orders are    |
+                  |  small and his expenses     |
+                  |  are large, so his father   |
+                  |  feels pessimistic over     |
+                  |  his prospects.             |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              XI
+
+
+                                          CHICAGO, April 10, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ You ought to be feeling mighty thankful to-day to the
+fellow who invented fractions, because while your selling cost for last
+month was within the limit, it took a good deal of help from the decimal
+system to get it there. You are in the position of the boy who was
+chased by the bull--open to congratulations because he reached the tree
+first, and to condolence because a fellow up a tree, in the middle of a
+forty-acre lot, with a disappointed bull for company, is in a mighty bad
+fix.
+
+I don't want to bear down hard on you right at the beginning of your
+life on the road, but I would feel a good deal happier over your showing
+if you would make a downright failure or a clean-cut success once in a
+while, instead of always just skinning through this way. It looks to me
+as if you were trying only half as hard as you could, and in trying
+it's the second half that brings results. If there's one piece of
+knowledge that is of less use to a fellow than knowing when he's beat,
+it's knowing when he's done just enough work to keep from being fired.
+Of course, you are bright enough to be a half-way man, and to hold a
+half-way place on a half-way salary by doing half the work you are
+capable of, but you've got to add dynamite and ginger and jounce to your
+equipment if you want to get the other half that's coming to you. You've
+got to believe that the Lord made the first hog with the Graham brand
+burned in the skin, and that the drove which rushed down a steep place
+was packed by a competitor. You've got to know your goods from A to
+Izzard, from snout to tail, on the hoof and in the can. You've got to
+know 'em like a young mother knows baby talk, and to be as proud of 'em
+as the young father of a twelve-pound boy, without really thinking that
+you're stretching it four pounds. You've got to believe in yourself and
+make your buyers take stock in you at par and accrued interest. You've
+got to have the scent of a bloodhound for an order, and the grip of a
+bulldog on a customer. You've got to feel the same personal solicitude
+over a bill of goods that strays off to a competitor as a parson over a
+backslider, and hold special services to bring it back into the fold.
+You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to
+go to bed with satisfaction. You've got to eat hog, think hog, dream
+hog--in short, go the whole hog if you're going to win out in the
+pork-packing business.
+
+That's a pretty liberal receipt, I know, but it's intended for a fellow
+who wants to make a good-sized pie. And the only thing you ever find in
+pastry that you don't put in yourself is flies.
+
+You have had a wide-open chance during the last few months to pick up a
+good deal about the practical end of the business, and between trips
+now you ought to spend every spare minute in the packing-house getting
+posted. Nothing earns better interest than judicious questions, and the
+man who invests in more knowledge of the business than he has to have in
+order to hold his job has capital with which to buy a mortgage on a
+better one.
+
+I may be mistaken, but I am just a little afraid that you really did not
+get beyond a bowing acquaintance with Mr. Porker when you were here at
+the packing-house. Of course, there isn't anything particularly pretty
+about a hog, but any animal which has its kindly disposition and
+benevolent inclination to yield up a handsome margin of profit to those
+who get close to it, is worthy of a good deal of respect and attention.
+
+I ain't one of those who believe that a half knowledge of a subject is
+useless, but it has been my experience that when a fellow has that half
+knowledge he finds it's the other half which would really come in
+handy. So, when a man's in the selling end of the business what he
+really needs to know is the manufacturing end; and when he's in the
+factory he can't know too much about the trade.
+
+You're just about due now to run into a smart Aleck buyer who'll show
+you a sample of lard which he'll say was made by a competitor, and ask
+what you think the grand jury ought to do to a house which had the nerve
+to label it "leaf." Of course, you will nose around it and look wise and
+say that, while you hesitate to criticize, you are afraid it would smell
+like a hot-box on a freight if any one tried to fry doughnuts in it.
+That is the place where the buyer will call for Jack and Charlie to get
+in on the laugh, and when he has wiped away the tears he will tell you
+that it is your own lard, and prove it to you. Of course, there won't be
+anything really the matter with it, and if you had been properly posted
+you would have looked surprised when he showed it to you and have said:
+
+"I don't quite diagnose the case your way, Mr. Smith; that's a blamed
+sight better lard than I thought Muggins & Co. were making." And you'd
+have driven a spike right through that fellow's little joke and have
+nailed down his order hard and tight with the same blow.
+
+What you know is a club for yourself, and what you don't know is a
+meat-ax for the other fellow. That is why you want to be on the lookout
+all the time for information about the business, and to nail a fact just
+as a sensible man nails a mosquito--the first time it settles near him.
+Of course, a fellow may get another chance, but the odds are that if he
+misses the first opening he will lose a good deal of blood before he
+gets the second.
+
+[Illustration: "_Josh Jenkinson would eat a little food now and then
+just to be sociable, but what he really lived on was tobacco._"]
+
+Speaking of finishing up a subject as you go along naturally calls to
+mind the case of Josh Jenkinson, back in my home town. As I first
+remember Josh, he was just bone and by-products. Wasn't an ounce of real
+meat on him. In fact, he was so blamed thin that when he bought an
+outfit of clothes his wife used to make them over into two suits for
+him. Josh would eat a little food now and then, just to be sociable, but
+what he really lived on was tobacco. Usually kept a chew in one cheek
+and a cob pipe in the other. He was a powerful hand for a joke and had
+one of those porous heads and movable scalps which go with a sense of
+humor in a small village. Used to scare us boys by drawing in on his
+pipe and letting the smoke sort of leak out through his eyes and ears
+and nose. Pretended that he was the devil and that he was on fire
+inside. Old Doc Hoover caught him at it once and told us that he wasn't,
+but allowed that he was a blood relation.
+
+Elder Hoover was a Methodist off the tip of the sirloin. There weren't
+any evasions or generalities or metaphors in his religion. The lower
+layers of the hereafter weren't Hades or Gehenna with him, but just
+plain Hell, and mighty hot, too, you bet. His creed was built of sheet
+iron and bolted together with inch rivets. He kept the fire going under
+the boiler night and day, and he was so blamed busy stoking it that he
+didn't have much time to map out the golden streets. When he blew off it
+was super-heated steam and you could see the sinners who were in range
+fairly sizzle and parboil and shrivel up. There was no give in Doc; no
+compromises with creditors; no fire sales. He wasn't one of those elders
+who would let a fellow dance the lancers if he'd swear off on waltzing;
+or tell him it was all right to play whist in the parlor if he'd give up
+penny-ante at the Dutchman's; or wink at his smoking if he'd quit
+whisky.
+
+Josh knew this, so he kept away from the camp-meeting, though the Elder
+gunned for him pretty steady for a matter of five years. But one summer
+when the meetings were extra interesting, it got so lonesome sitting
+around with the whole town off in the woods that Josh sneaked out to the
+edge of the camp and hid behind some bushes where he could hear what was
+going on. The elder was carrying about two hundred and fifty pounds, by
+the gauge, that day, and with that pressure he naturally traveled into
+the sinners pretty fast. The first thing Josh knew he was out from under
+cover and a-hallelujahing down between the seats to the mourners' bench.
+When the elder saw what was coming he turned on the forced draft. Inside
+of ten minutes he had Josh under conviction and had taken his pipe and
+plug away from him.
+
+I am just a little inclined to think that Josh would have backslid if he
+hadn't been a practical joker, and a critter of that breed is about as
+afraid of a laugh on himself as a raw colt of a steam roller. So he
+stuck it out, and began to take an interest in meal time. Kicked because
+it didn't come eight or ten times a day. The first thing he knew he had
+fatted up till he filled out his half suit and had to put it away in
+camphor. Then he bought a whole suit, living-skeleton size. In two weeks
+he had strained a shoulder seam and looked as if he was wearing tights.
+So he retired it from circulation and moved up a size. That one was a
+little loose, and it took him a good month to crowd it.
+
+Josh was a pretty hefty man now, but he kept right on bulging out,
+building on an addition here and putting out a bay window there, all the
+time retiring new suits, until his wife had fourteen of them laid away
+in the chest.
+
+Said it didn't worry him; that he was bound to lose flesh sooner or
+later. That he would catch them on the way down, and wear them out one
+at a time. But when he got up to three hundred and fifty pounds he just
+stuck. Tried exercise and dieting and foreign waters, but he couldn't
+budge an ounce. In the end he had to give the clothes to the Widow
+Doolan, who had fourteen sons in assorted sizes.
+
+I simply mention Josh in passing as an example of the fact that a fellow
+can't bank on getting a chance to go back and take up a thing that he
+has passed over once, and to call your attention to the fact that a man
+who knows his own business thoroughly will find an opportunity sooner or
+later of reaching the most hardened cuss of a buyer on his route and of
+getting a share of his.
+
+I want to caution you right here against learning all there is to know
+about pork-packing too quick. Business is a good deal like a nigger's
+wool--it doesn't look very deep, but there are a heap of kinks and
+curves in it.
+
+When I was a boy and the fellow in pink tights came into the ring, I
+used to think he was doing all that could be reasonably expected when he
+kept eight or ten glass balls going in the air at once. But the
+beautiful lady in the blue tights would keep right on handing him
+things--kerosene lamps and carving knives and miscellaneous cutlery and
+crockery, and he would get them going, too, without losing his happy
+smile. The great trouble with most young fellows is that they think
+they have learned all they need to know and have given the audience its
+money's worth when they can keep the glass balls going, and so they balk
+at the kerosene lamps and the rest of the implements of light
+housekeeping. But there's no real limit to the amount of extras a fellow
+with the right stuff in him will take on without losing his grin.
+
+I want to see you come up smiling; I want to feel you in the business,
+not only on pay day but every other day. I want to know that you are
+running yourself full time and overtime, stocking up your brain so that
+when the demand comes you will have the goods to offer. So far, you
+promise to make a fair to ordinary salesman among our retail trade. I
+want to see you grow into a car-lot man--so strong and big that you will
+force us to see that you are out of place among the little fellows. Buck
+up!
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +---------------------------+
+                  |          No. 12           |
+                  +---------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at     |
+                  |  the Union Stock Yards    |
+                  |  in Chicago, to his son,  |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at Little    |
+                  |  Delmonico's, Prairie     |
+                  |  Centre, Indiana. Mr.     |
+                  |  Pierrepont has annoyed   |
+                  |  his father by accepting  |
+                  |  his criticisms in a      |
+                  |  spirit of gentle, but    |
+                  |  most reprehensible,      |
+                  |  resignation.             |
+                  +---------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              XII
+
+
+                                          CHICAGO, April 15, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ Don't ever write me another of those sad, sweet,
+gentle sufferer letters. It's only natural that a colt should kick a
+trifle when he's first hitched up to the break wagon, and I'm always a
+little suspicious of a critter that stands too quiet under the whip. I
+know it's not meekness, but meanness, that I've got to fight, and it's
+hard to tell which is the worst.
+
+The only animal which the Bible calls patient is an ass, and that's both
+good doctrine and good natural history. For I had to make considerable
+of a study of the Missouri mule when I was a boy, and I discovered that
+he's not really patient, but that he only pretends to be. You can cuss
+him out till you've nothing but holy thoughts left in you to draw on,
+and you can lay the rawhide on him till he's striped like a circus
+zebra, and if you're cautious and reserved in his company he will just
+look grieved and pained and resigned. But all the time that mule will be
+getting meaner and meaner inside, adding compound cussedness every
+thirty days, and practicing drop kicks in his stall after dark.
+
+Of course, nothing in this world is wholly bad, not even a mule, for he
+is half horse. But my observation has taught me that the horse half of
+him is the front half, and that the only really safe way to drive him is
+hind-side first. I suppose that you could train one to travel that way,
+but it really doesn't seem worth while when good roadsters are so cheap.
+
+That's the way I feel about these young fellows who lazy along trying to
+turn in at every gate where there seems to be a little shade, and
+sulking and balking whenever you say "git-ap" to them. They are the men
+who are always howling that Bill Smith was promoted because he had a
+pull, and that they are being held down because the manager is jealous
+of them. I've seen a good many pulls in my time, but I never saw one
+strong enough to lift a man any higher than he could raise himself by
+his boot straps, or long enough to reach through the cashier's window
+for more money than its owner earned.
+
+When a fellow brags that he has a pull, he's a liar or his employer's a
+fool. And when a fellow whines that he's being held down, the truth is,
+as a general thing, that his boss can't hold him up. He just picks a
+nice, soft spot, stretches out flat on his back, and yells that some
+heartless brute has knocked him down and is sitting on his chest.
+
+A good man is as full of bounce as a cat with a small boy and a bull
+terrier after him. When he's thrown to the dog from the second-story
+window, he fixes while he's sailing through the air to land right, and
+when the dog jumps for the spot where he hits, he isn't there, but in
+the top of the tree across the street. He's a good deal like the little
+red-headed cuss that we saw in the football game you took me to. Every
+time the herd stampeded it would start in to trample and paw and gore
+him. One minute the whole bunch would be on top of him and the next he
+would be loping off down the range, spitting out hair and pieces of
+canvas jacket, or standing on one side as cool as a hog on ice, watching
+the mess unsnarl and the removal of the cripples.
+
+I didn't understand football, but I understood that little sawed-off. He
+knew his business. And when a fellow knows his business, he doesn't have
+to explain to people that he does. It isn't what a man knows, but what
+he thinks he knows that he brags about. Big talk means little knowledge.
+
+There's a vast difference between having a carload of miscellaneous
+facts sloshing around loose in your head and getting all mixed up in
+transit, and carrying the same assortment properly boxed and crated for
+convenient handling and immediate delivery. A ham never weighs so much
+as when it's half cured. When it has soaked in all the pickle that it
+can, it has to sweat out most of it in the smoke-house before it is any
+real good; and when you've soaked up all the information you can hold,
+you will have to forget half of it before you will be of any real use to
+the house. If there's anything worse than knowing too little, it's
+knowing too much. Education will broaden a narrow mind, but there's no
+known cure for a big head. The best you can hope is that it will swell
+up and bust; and then, of course, there's nothing left. Poverty never
+spoils a good man, but prosperity often does. It's easy to stand hard
+times, because that's the only thing you can do, but in good times the
+fool-killer has to do night work.
+
+I simply mention these things in a general way. A good many of them
+don't apply to you, no doubt, but it won't do any harm to make sure.
+Most men get cross-eyed when they come to size themselves up, and see
+an angel instead of what they're trying to look at. There's nothing that
+tells the truth to a woman like a mirror, or that lies harder to a man.
+
+What I am sure of is that you have got the sulks too quick. If you knew
+all that you'll have to learn before you'll be a big, broad-gauged
+merchant, you might have something to be sulky about.
+
+When you've posted yourself properly about the business you'll have
+taken a step in the right direction--you will be able to get your
+buyer's attention. All the other steps are those which lead you into his
+confidence.
+
+Right here you will discover that you are in the fix of the young fellow
+who married his best girl and took her home to live with his mother. He
+found that the only way in which he could make one happy was by making
+the other mad, and that when he tried to make them both happy he only
+succeeded in making them both mad. Naturally, in the end, his wife
+divorced him and his mother disinherited him, and left her money to an
+orphan asylum, because, as she sensibly observed in the codicil,
+"orphans can not be ungrateful to their parents." But if the man had had
+a little tact he would have kept them in separate houses, and have let
+each one think that she was getting a trifle the best of it, without
+really giving it to either.
+
+Tact is the knack of keeping quiet at the right time; of being so
+agreeable yourself that no one can be disagreeable to you; of making
+inferiority feel like equality. A tactful man can pull the stinger from
+a bee without getting stung.
+
+Some men deal in facts, and call Bill Jones a liar. They get knocked
+down. Some men deal in subterfuges, and say that Bill Jones' father was
+a kettle-rendered liar, and that his mother's maiden name was Sapphira,
+and that any one who believes in the Darwinian theory should pity
+rather than blame their son. They get disliked. But your tactful man
+says that since Baron Munchausen no one has been so chuck full of bully
+reminiscences as Bill Jones; and when that comes back to Bill he is half
+tickled to death, because he doesn't know that the higher criticism has
+hurt the Baron's reputation. That man gets the trade.
+
+There are two kinds of information: one to which everybody's entitled,
+and that is taught at school; and one which nobody ought to know except
+yourself, and that is what you think of Bill Jones. Of course, where you
+feel a man is not square you will be armed to meet him, but never on his
+own ground. Make him be honest with you if you can, but don't let him
+make you dishonest with him.
+
+When you make a mistake, don't make the second one--keeping it to
+yourself. Own up. The time to sort out rotten eggs is at the nest. The
+deeper you hide them in the case the longer they stay in circulation,
+and the worse impression they make when they finally come to the
+breakfast-table. A mistake sprouts a lie when you cover it up. And one
+lie breeds enough distrust to choke out the prettiest crop of confidence
+that a fellow ever cultivated.
+
+Of course, it's easy to have the confidence of the house, or the
+confidence of the buyer, but you've got to have both. The house pays you
+your salary, and the buyer helps you earn it. If you skin the buyer you
+will lose your trade; and if you play tag with the house you will lose
+your job. You've simply got to walk the fence straight, for if you step
+to either side you'll find a good deal of air under you.
+
+Even after you are able to command the attention and the confidence of
+your buyers, you've got to be up and dressed all day to hold what trade
+is yours, and twisting and turning all night to wriggle into some of
+the other fellow's. When business is good, that is the time to force it,
+because it will come easy; and when it is bad, that is the time to force
+it, too, because we will need the orders.
+
+Speaking of making trade naturally calls to my mind my old acquaintance,
+Herr Doctor Paracelsus Von Munsterberg, who, when I was a boy, came to
+our town "fresh from his healing triumphs at the Courts of Europe," as
+his handbills ran, "not to make money, but to confer on suffering
+mankind the priceless boon of health; to make the sick well, and the
+well better."
+
+Munsterberg wasn't one of your common, coarse, county-fair barkers. He
+was a pretty high-toned article. Had nice, curly black hair and didn't
+spare the bear's grease. Wore a silk hat and a Prince Albert coat all
+the time, except when he was orating, and then he shed the coat to get
+freer action with his arms. And when he talked he used the whole
+language, you bet.
+
+[Illustration: "_Herr Doctor Paracelsus Von Munsterberg was a pretty
+high-toned article._"]
+
+Of course, the Priceless Boon was put up in bottles, labeled
+Munsterberg's Miraculous Medical Discovery, and, simply to introduce it,
+he was willing to sell the small size at fifty cents and the large one
+at a dollar. In addition to being a philanthropist the Doctor was quite
+a hand at card tricks, played the banjo, sung coon songs and imitated a
+saw going through a board very creditably. All these accomplishments,
+and the story of how he cured the Emperor of Austria's sister with a
+single bottle, drew a crowd, but they didn't sell a drop of the
+Discovery. Nobody in town was really sick, and those who thought they
+were had stocked up the week before with Quackenboss' Quick Quinine Kure
+from a fellow that made just as liberal promises as Munsterberg and sold
+the large size at fifty cents, including a handsome reproduction of an
+old master for the parlor.
+
+Some fellows would just have cussed a little and have moved on to the
+next town, but Munsterberg made a beautiful speech, praising the
+climate, and saying that in his humble capacity he had been privileged
+to meet the strength and beauty of many Courts, but never had he been in
+any place where strength was stronger or beauty beautifuller than right
+here in Hoskins' Corners. He prayed with all his heart, though it was
+almost too much to hope, that the cholera, which was raging in Kentucky,
+would pass this Eden by; that the yellow fever, which was devastating
+Tennessee, would halt abashed before this stronghold of health, though
+he felt bound to add that it was a peculiarly malignant and persistent
+disease; that the smallpox, which was creeping southward from Canada,
+would smite the next town instead of ours, though he must own that it
+was no respecter of persons; that the diphtheria and scarlet-fever,
+which were sweeping over New England and crowding the graveyards, could
+be kept from crossing the Hudson, though they were great travelers and
+it was well to be prepared for the worst; that we one and all might
+providentially escape chills, headaches, coated tongue, pains in the
+back, loss of sleep and that tired feeling, but it was almost too much
+to ask, even of such a generous climate. In any event, he begged us to
+beware of worthless nostrums and base imitations. It made him sad to
+think that to-day we were here and that to-morrow we were running up an
+undertaker's bill, all for the lack of a small bottle of Medicine's
+greatest gift to Man.
+
+I could see that this speech made a lot of women in the crowd powerful
+uneasy, and I heard the Widow Judkins say that she was afraid it was
+going to be "a mighty sickly winter," and she didn't know as it would do
+any harm to have some of that stuff in the house. But the Doctor didn't
+offer the Priceless Boon for sale again. He went right from his speech
+into an imitation of a dog, with a tin can tied to his tail, running
+down Main Street and crawling under Si Hooper's store at the far end of
+it--an imitation, he told us, to which the Sultan was powerful partial,
+"him being a cruel man and delighting in torturing the poor dumb beasts
+which the Lord has given us to love, honor and cherish."
+
+He kept this sort of thing up till he judged it was our bedtime, and
+then he thanked us "one and all for our kind attention," and said that
+as his mission in life was to amuse as well as to heal, he would stay
+over till the next afternoon and give a special matinée for the little
+ones, whom he loved for the sake of his own golden-haired Willie, back
+there over the Rhine.
+
+Naturally, all the women and children turned out the next afternoon,
+though the men had to be at work in the fields and the stores, and the
+Doctor just made us roar for half an hour. Then, while he was singing an
+uncommon funny song, Mrs. Brown's Johnny let out a howl.
+
+The Doctor stopped short. "Bring the poor little sufferer here, Madam,
+and let me see if I can soothe his agony," says he.
+
+Mrs. Brown was a good deal embarrassed and more scared, but she pushed
+Johnny, yelling all the time, up to the Doctor, who began tapping him on
+the back and looking down his throat. Naturally, this made Johnny cry
+all the harder, and his mother was beginning to explain that she
+"reckoned she must have stepped on his sore toe," when the Doctor struck
+his forehead, cried "Eureka!", whipped out a bottle of the Priceless
+Boon, and forced a spoonful of it into Johnny's mouth. Then he gave the
+boy three slaps on the back and three taps on the stomach, ran one hand
+along his windpipe, and took a small button-hook out of his mouth with
+the other.
+
+Johnny made all his previous attempts at yelling sound like an imitation
+when he saw this, and he broke away and ran toward home. Then the Doctor
+stuck one hand in over the top of his vest, waved the button-hook in
+the other, and cried: "Woman, your child is cured! Your button-hook is
+found!"
+
+Then he went on to explain that when baby swallowed safety-pins, or
+pennies, or fish-bones, or button-hooks, or any little household
+articles, that all you had to do was to give it a spoonful of the
+Priceless Boon, tap it gently fore and aft, hold your hand under its
+mouth, and the little article would drop out like chocolate from a slot
+machine.
+
+Every one was talking at once, now, and nobody had any time for Mrs.
+Brown, who was trying to say something. Finally she got mad and followed
+Johnny home. Half an hour later the Doctor drove out of the Corners,
+leaving his stock of the Priceless Boon distributed--for the usual
+consideration--among all the mothers in town.
+
+It was not until the next day that Mrs. Brown got a chance to explain
+that while the Boon might be all that the Doctor claimed for it, no one
+in her house had ever owned a button-hook, because her old man wore
+jack-boots and she wore congress shoes, and little Johnny wore just
+plain feet.
+
+I simply mention the Doctor in passing, not as an example in morals, but
+in methods. Some salesmen think that selling is like eating--to satisfy
+an existing appetite; but a good salesman is like a good cook--he can
+create an appetite when the buyer isn't hungry.
+
+I don't care how good old methods are, new ones are better, even if
+they're only just as good. That's not so Irish as it sounds. Doing the
+same thing in the same way year after year is like eating a quail a day
+for thirty days. Along toward the middle of the month a fellow begins to
+long for a broiled crow or a slice of cold dog.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 13           |
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at      |
+                  |  the Union Stock Yards     |
+                  |  in Chicago, to his son,   |
+                  |  Pierrepont, care of The   |
+                  |  Hoosier Grocery Co.,      |
+                  |  Indianapolis, Indiana.    |
+                  |  Mr. Pierrepont's orders   |
+                  |  have been looking up, so  |
+                  |  the old man gives him a   |
+                  |  pat on the back--but not  |
+                  |  too hard a one.           |
+                  +----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              XIII
+
+
+                                            CHICAGO, May 10, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ That order for a carload of Spotless Snow Leaf from
+old Shorter is the kind of back talk I like. We can stand a little more
+of the same sort of sassing. I have told the cashier that you will draw
+thirty a week after this, and I want you to have a nice suit of clothes
+made and send the bill to the old man. Get something that won't keep
+people guessing whether you follow the horses or do buck and wing dancing
+for a living. Your taste in clothes seems to be lasting longer than the
+rest of your college education. You looked like a young widow who had
+raised the second crop of daisies over the deceased when you were in here
+last week.
+
+Of course, clothes don't make the man, but they make all of him except
+his hands and face during business hours, and that's a pretty
+considerable area of the human animal. A dirty shirt may hide a pure
+heart, but it seldom covers a clean skin. If you look as if you had
+slept in your clothes, most men will jump to the conclusion that you
+have, and you will never get to know them well enough to explain that
+your head is so full of noble thoughts that you haven't time to bother
+with the dandruff on your shoulders. And if you wear blue and white
+striped pants and a red necktie, you will find it difficult to get close
+enough to a deacon to be invited to say grace at his table, even if you
+never play for anything except coffee or beans.
+
+Appearances are deceitful, I know, but so long as they are, there's
+nothing like having them deceive for us instead of against us. I've seen
+a ten-cent shave and a five-cent shine get a thousand-dollar job, and a
+cigarette and a pint of champagne knock the bottom out of a
+million-dollar pork corner. Four or five years ago little Jim Jackson
+had the bears in the provision pit hibernating and living on their own
+fat till one morning, the day after he had run the price of mess pork up
+to twenty dollars and nailed it there, some one saw him drinking a small
+bottle just before he went on 'Change, and told it round among the
+brokers on the floor. The bears thought Jim must have had bad news, to
+be bracing up at that time in the morning, so they perked up and
+everlastingly sold the mess pork market down through the bottom of the
+pit to solid earth. There wasn't even a grease spot left of that corner
+when they got through. As it happened, Jim hadn't had any bad news; he
+just took the drink because he felt pretty good, and things were coming
+his way.
+
+But it isn't enough to be all right in this world; you've got to look
+all right as well, because two-thirds of success is making people think
+you are all right. So you have to be governed by general rules, even
+though you may be an exception. People have seen four and four make
+eight, and the young man and the small bottle make a damned fool so
+often that they are hard to convince that the combination can work out
+any other way. The Lord only allows so much fun for every man that He
+makes. Some get it going fishing most of the time and making money the
+rest; some get it making money most of the time and going fishing the
+rest. You can take your choice, but the two lines of business don't gee.
+The more money, the less fish. The farther you go, the straighter you've
+got to walk.
+
+I used to get a heap of solid comfort out of chewing tobacco. Picked up
+the habit in Missouri, and took to it like a Yankee to pie. At that time
+pretty much every one in those parts chewed, except the Elder and the
+women, and most of them snuffed. Seemed a nice, sociable habit, and I
+never thought anything special about it till I came North and your Ma
+began to tell me it was a vile relic of barbarism, meaning Missouri, I
+suppose. Then I confined operations to my office and took to fine cut
+instead of plug, as being tonier.
+
+Well, one day, about ten years ago, when I was walking through the
+office, I noticed one of the boys on the mailing-desk, a mighty
+likely-looking youngster, sort of working his jaws as he wrote. I didn't
+stop to think, but somehow I was mad in a minute. Still, I didn't say a
+word--just stood and looked at him while he speeded up the way the boys
+will when they think the old man is nosing around to see whose salary he
+can raise next.
+
+I stood over him for a matter of five minutes, and all the time he was
+pretending not to see me at all. I will say that he was a pretty game
+boy, for he never weakened for a second. But at last, seeing he was
+about to choke to death, I said, sharp and sudden--"Spit."
+
+Well, sir, I thought it was a cloudburst. You can bet I was pretty hot,
+and I started in to curl up that young fellow to a crisp. But before I
+got out a word, something hit me all of a sudden, and I just went up to
+the boy and put my hand on his shoulder and said, "Let's swear off, son."
+
+Naturally, he swore off--he was so blamed scared that he would have quit
+breathing if I had asked him to, I reckon. And I had to take my stock of
+fine cut and send it to the heathen.
+
+I simply mention this little incident in passing as an example of the
+fact that a man can't do what he pleases in this world, because the
+higher he climbs the plainer people can see him. Naturally, as the old
+man's son, you have a lot of fellows watching you and betting that you
+are no good. If you succeed they will say it was an accident; and if you
+fail they will say it was a cinch.
+
+There are two unpardonable sins in this world--success and failure.
+Those who succeed can't forgive a fellow for being a failure, and those
+who fail can't forgive him for being a success. If you do succeed, though,
+you will be too busy to bother very much about what the failures think.
+
+I dwell a little on this matter of appearances because so few men are
+really thinking animals. Where one fellow reads a stranger's character
+in his face, a hundred read it in his get-up. We have shown a dozen
+breeds of dukes and droves of college presidents and doctors of divinity
+through the packing-house, and the workmen never noticed them except to
+throw livers at them when they got in their way. But when John L.
+Sullivan went through the stock yards it just simply shut down the
+plant. The men quit the benches with a yell and lined up to cheer him.
+You see, John looked his job, and you didn't have to explain to the men
+that he was the real thing in prize-fighters. Of course, when a fellow
+gets to the point where he is something in particular, he doesn't have
+to care because he doesn't look like anything special; but while a young
+fellow isn't anything in particular, it is a mighty valuable asset if he
+looks like something special.
+
+Just here I want to say that while it's all right for the other fellow
+to be influenced by appearances, it's all wrong for you to go on them.
+Back up good looks by good character yourself, and make sure that the
+other fellow does the same. A suspicious man makes trouble for himself,
+but a cautious one saves it. Because there ain't any rotten apples in
+the top layer, it ain't always safe to bet that the whole barrel is
+sound.
+
+[Illustration: "_When John L. Sullivan went through the stock yards, it
+just simply shut down the plant._"]
+
+A man doesn't snap up a horse just because he looks all right. As a
+usual thing that only makes him wonder what really is the matter that
+the other fellow wants to sell. So he leads the nag out into the middle
+of a ten-acre lot, where the light will strike him good and strong, and
+examines every hair of his hide, as if he expected to find it near-seal,
+or some other base imitation; and he squints under each hoof for the
+grand hailing sign of distress; and he peeks down his throat for dark
+secrets. If the horse passes this degree the buyer drives him twenty or
+thirty miles, expecting him to turn out a roarer, or to find that he
+balks, or shies, or goes lame, or develops some other horse nonsense.
+If after all that there are no bad symptoms, he offers fifty less than
+the price asked, on general principles, and for fear he has missed
+something.
+
+Take men and horses, by and large, and they run pretty much the same.
+There's nothing like trying a man in harness a while before you bind
+yourself to travel very far with him.
+
+I remember giving a nice-looking, clean-shaven fellow a job on the
+billing-desk, just on his looks, but he turned out such a poor hand at
+figures that I had to fire him at the end of a week. It seemed that the
+morning he struck me for the place he had pawned his razor for fifteen
+cents in order to get a shave. Naturally, if I had known that in the
+first place I wouldn't have hired him as a human arithmetic.
+
+Another time I had a collector that I set a heap of store by. Always
+handled himself just right when he talked to you and kept himself
+looking right up to the mark. His salary wasn't very big, but he had
+such a persuasive way that he seemed to get a dollar and a half's worth
+of value out of every dollar that he earned. Never crowded the fashions
+and never gave 'em any slack. If sashes were the thing with summer
+shirts, why Charlie had a sash, you bet, and when tight trousers were
+the nobby trick in pants, Charlie wore his double reefed. Take him fore
+and aft, Charlie looked all right and talked all right--always careful,
+always considerate, always polite.
+
+One noon, after he had been with me for a year or two, I met him coming
+in from his route looking glum; so I handed him fifty dollars as a
+little sweetener. I never saw a fifty cheer a man up like that one did
+Charlie, and he thanked me just right--didn't stutter and didn't slop
+over. I earmarked Charlie for a raise and a better job right there.
+
+Just after that I got mixed up with some work in my private office and I
+didn't look around again till on toward closing time. Then, right
+outside my door I met the office manager, and he looked mighty glum,
+too.
+
+"I was just going to knock on your door," said he.
+
+"Well?" I asked.
+
+"Charlie Chasenberry is eight hundred dollars short in his collections."
+
+"Um--m," I said, without blinking, but I had a gone feeling just the
+same.
+
+"I had a plain-clothes man here to arrest him this evening, but he
+didn't come in."
+
+"Looks as if he'd skipped, eh?" I asked.
+
+"I'm afraid so, but I don't know how. He didn't have a dollar this
+morning, because he tried to overdraw his salary account and I wouldn't
+let him, and he didn't collect any bills to-day because he had already
+collected everything that was due this week and lost it bucking the
+tiger."
+
+I didn't say anything, but I suspected that there was a sucker somewhere
+in the office. The next day I was sure of it, for I got a telegram from
+the always polite and thoughtful Charlie, dated at Montreal:
+
+     "Many, many thanks, dear Mr. Graham, for your timely assistance."
+
+Careful as usual, you see, about the little things, for there were just
+ten words in the message. But that "Many, many thanks, dear Mr. Graham,"
+was the closest to slopping over I had ever known him to come.
+
+I consider the little lesson that Charlie gave me as cheap at eight
+hundred and fifty dollars, and I pass it along to you because it may
+save you a thousand or two on your experience account.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 14           |
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at the  |
+                  |  Union Stock Yards in      |
+                  |  Chicago, to his son,      |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at The        |
+                  |  Travelers' Rest, New      |
+                  |  Albany, Indiana. Mr.      |
+                  |  Pierrepont has taken a    |
+                  |  little flyer in short     |
+                  |  ribs on 'Change, and has  |
+                  |  accidentally come into    |
+                  |  the line of his father's  |
+                  |  vision.                   |
+                  +----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              XIV
+
+
+                                           CHICAGO, July 15, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ I met young Horshey, of Horshey & Horter, the grain
+and provision brokers, at luncheon yesterday, and while we were talking
+over the light run of hogs your name came up somehow, and he congratulated
+me on having such a smart son. Like an old fool, I allowed that you were
+bright enough to come in out of the rain if somebody called you, though I
+ought to have known better, for it seems as if I never start in to brag
+about your being sound and sweet that I don't have to wind up by allowing
+a rebate for skippers.
+
+Horshey was so blamed anxious to show that you were over-weight--he
+wants to handle some of my business on 'Change--that he managed to prove
+you a light-weight. Told me you had ordered him to sell a hundred
+thousand ribs short last week, and that he had just bought them in on a
+wire from you at a profit of four hundred and sixty-odd dollars. I was
+mighty hot, you bet, to know that you had been speculating, but I had to
+swallow and allow that you were a pretty sharp boy. I told Horshey to
+close out the account and send me a check for your profits and I would
+forward it, as I wanted to give you a tip on the market before you did
+any more trading.
+
+I inclose the check herewith. Please indorse it over to the treasurer of
+The Home for Half Orphans and return at once. I will see that he gets it
+with your compliments.
+
+Now, I want to give you that tip on the market. There are several
+reasons why it isn't safe for you to trade on 'Change just now, but the
+particular one is that Graham & Co. will fire you if you do. Trading on
+margin is a good deal like paddling around the edge of the old swimming
+hole--it seems safe and easy at first, but before a fellow knows it he
+has stepped off the edge into deep water. The wheat pit is only thirty
+feet across, but it reaches clear down to Hell. And trading on margin
+means trading on the ragged edge of nothing. When a man buys, he's
+buying something that the other fellow hasn't got. When a man sells,
+he's selling something that he hasn't got. And it's been my experience
+that the net profit on nothing is nit. When a speculator wins he don't
+stop till he loses, and when he loses he can't stop till he wins.
+
+You have been in the packing business long enough now to know that it
+takes a bull only thirty seconds to lose his hide; and if you'll believe
+me when I tell you that they can skin a bear just as quick on 'Change,
+you won't have a Board of Trade Indian using your pelt for a rug during
+the long winter months.
+
+Because you are the son of a pork packer you may think that you know a
+little more than the next fellow about paper pork. There's nothing in
+it. The poorest men on earth are the relations of millionaires. When I
+sell futures on 'Change, they're against hogs that are traveling into
+dry salt at the rate of one a second, and if the market goes up on me
+I've got the solid meat to deliver. But, if you lose, the only part of
+the hog which you can deliver is the squeal.
+
+I wouldn't bear down so hard on this matter if money was the only thing
+that a fellow could lose on 'Change. But if a clerk sells pork, and the
+market goes down, he's mighty apt to get a lot of ideas with holes in
+them and bad habits as the small change of his profits. And if the
+market goes up, he's likely to go short his self-respect to win back his
+money.
+
+Most men think that they can figure up all their assets in dollars and
+cents, but a merchant may owe a hundred thousand dollars and be solvent.
+A man's got to lose more than money to be broke. When a fellow's got a
+straight backbone and a clear eye his creditors don't have to lie awake
+nights worrying over his liabilities. You can hide your meanness from
+your brain and your tongue, but the eye and the backbone won't keep
+secrets. When the tongue lies, the eyes tell the truth.
+
+I know you'll think that the old man is bucking and kicking up a lot of
+dust over a harmless little flyer. But I've kept a heap smarter boys
+than you out of Joliet when they found it easy to feed the Board of
+Trade hog out of my cash drawer, after it had sucked up their savings in
+a couple of laps.
+
+You must learn not to overwork a dollar any more than you would a horse.
+Three per cent. is a small load for it to draw; six, a safe one; when it
+pulls in ten for you it's likely working out West and you've got to
+watch to see that it doesn't buck; when it makes twenty you own a blame
+good critter or a mighty foolish one, and you want to make dead sure
+which; but if it draws a hundred it's playing the races or something
+just as hard on horses and dollars, and the first thing you know you
+won't have even a carcass to haul to the glue factory.
+
+I dwell a little on this matter of speculation because you've got to
+live next door to the Board of Trade all your life, and it's a safe
+thing to know something about a neighbor's dogs before you try to pat
+them. Sure Things, Straight Tips and Dead Cinches will come running out
+to meet you, wagging their tails and looking as innocent as if they
+hadn't just killed a lamb, but they'll bite. The only safe road to
+follow in speculation leads straight away from the Board of Trade on
+the dead run.
+
+Speaking of sure things naturally calls to mind the case of my old
+friend Deacon Wiggleford, whom I used to know back in Missouri years
+ago. The Deacon was a powerful pious man, and he was good according to
+his lights, but he didn't use a very superior article of kerosene to
+keep them burning.
+
+Used to take up half the time in prayer-meeting talking about how we
+were all weak vessels and stewards. But he was so blamed busy exhorting
+others to give out of the fullness with which the Lord had blessed them
+that he sort of forgot that the Lord had blessed him about fifty
+thousand dollars' worth, and put it all in mighty safe property, too,
+you bet.
+
+The Deacon had a brother in Chicago whom he used to call a sore trial.
+Brother Bill was a broker on the Board of Trade, and, according to the
+Deacon, he was not only engaged in a mighty sinful occupation, but he
+was a mighty poor steward of his sinful gains. Smoked two-bit cigars
+and wore a plug hat. Drank a little and cussed a little and went to the
+Episcopal Church, though he had been raised a Methodist. Altogether it
+looked as if Bill was a pretty hard nut.
+
+Well, one fall the Deacon decided to go to Chicago himself to buy his
+winter goods, and naturally he hiked out to Brother Bill's to stay,
+which was considerable cheaper for him than the Palmer House, though,
+as he told us when he got back, it made him sick to see the waste.
+
+The Deacon had his mouth all fixed to tell Brother Bill that, in his
+opinion, he wasn't much better than a faro dealer, for he used to brag
+that he never let anything turn him from his duty, which meant his
+meddling in other people's business. I want to say right here that with
+most men duty means something unpleasant which the other fellow ought to
+do. As a matter of fact, a man's first duty is to mind his own business.
+It's been my experience that it takes about all the thought and work
+which one man can give to run one man right, and if a fellow's putting
+in five or six hours a day on his neighbor's character, he's mighty apt
+to scamp the building of his own.
+
+Well, when Brother Bill got home from business that first night, the
+Deacon explained that every time he lit a two-bit cigar he was
+depriving a Zulu of twenty-five helpful little tracts which might have
+made a better man of him; that fast horses were a snare and plug hats a
+wile of the Enemy; that the Board of Trade was the Temple of Belial and
+the brokers on it his sons and servants.
+
+Brother Bill listened mighty patiently to him, and when the Deacon had
+pumped out all the Scripture that was in him, and was beginning to suck
+air, he sort of slunk into the conversation like a setter pup that's
+been caught with the feathers on its chops.
+
+"Brother Zeke," says he, "I shall certainly let your words soak in. I
+want to be a number two red, hard, sound and clean sort of a man, and
+grade contract on delivery day. Perhaps, as you say, the rust has got
+into me and the Inspector won't pass me, and if I can see it that way
+I'll settle my trades and get out of the market for good."
+
+The Deacon knew that Brother Bill had scraped together considerable
+property, and, as he was a bachelor, it would come to him in case the
+broker was removed by any sudden dispensation. What he really feared was
+that this money might be fooled away in high living and speculation. And
+so he had banged away into the middle of the flock, hoping to bring down
+those two birds. Now that it began to look as if he might kill off the
+whole bunch he started in to hedge.
+
+"Is it safe, William?" says he.
+
+"As Sunday-school," says Bill, "if you do a strictly brokerage business
+and don't speculate."
+
+"I trust, William, that you recognize the responsibilities of your
+stewardship?"
+
+[Illustration: "_I started in to curl up that young fellow to a
+crisp._"]
+
+Bill fetched a groan. "Zeke," says he, "you cornered me there, and I
+'spose I might as well walk up to the Captain's office and settle. I
+hadn't bought or sold a bushel on my own account in a year till last
+week, when I got your letter saying that you were coming. Then I saw
+what looked like a safe chance to scalp the market for a couple of cents
+a bushel, and I bought 10,000 September, intending to turn over the
+profits to you as a little present, so that you could see the town and
+have a good time without it's costing you anything."
+
+The Deacon judged from Bill's expression that he had got nipped and was
+going to try to unload the loss on him, so he changed his face to the
+one which he used when attending the funeral of any one who hadn't been
+a professor, and came back quick and hard:
+
+"I'm surprised, William, that you should think I would accept money made
+in gambling. Let this be a lesson to you. How much did you lose?"
+
+"That's the worst of it--I didn't lose; I made two hundred dollars," and
+Bill hove another sigh.
+
+"Made two hundred dollars!" echoed the Deacon, and he changed his face
+again for the one which he used when he found a lead quarter in his
+till and couldn't remember who had passed it on him.
+
+"Yes," Bill went on, "and I'm ashamed of it, for you've made me see
+things in a new light. Of course, after what you've said, I know it
+would be an insult to offer you the money. And I feel now that it
+wouldn't be right to keep it myself. I must sleep on it and try to find
+the straight thing to do."
+
+I guess it really didn't interfere with Bill's sleep, but the Deacon sat
+up with the corpse of that two hundred dollars, you bet. In the morning
+at breakfast he asked Brother Bill to explain all about this speculating
+business, what made the market go up and down, and whether real corn or
+wheat or pork figured in any stage of a deal. Bill looked sort of sad
+and dreamy-eyed, as if his conscience hadn't digested that two hundred
+yet, but he was mighty obliging about explaining everything to Zeke. He
+had changed his face for the one which he wore when he sold an easy
+customer ground peas and chicory for O. G. Java, and every now and then
+he gulped as if he was going to start a hymn. When Bill told him how
+good and bad weather sent the market up and down, he nodded and said
+that that part of it was all right, because the weather was of the Lord.
+
+"Not on the Board of Trade it isn't," Bill answered back; "at least, not
+to any marked extent; it's from the weather man or some liar in the corn
+belt, and, as the weather man usually guesses wrong, I reckon there
+isn't any special inspiration about it. The game is to guess what's
+going to happen, not what has happened, and by the time the real weather
+comes along everybody has guessed wrong and knocked the market off a
+cent or two."
+
+That made the Deacon's chin whiskers droop a little, but he began to ask
+questions again, and by and by he discovered that away behind--about a
+hundred miles behind, but that was close enough for the Deacon--a deal
+in futures there were real wheat and pork. Said then that he'd been
+misinformed and misled; that speculation was a legitimate business,
+involving skill and sagacity; that his last scruple was removed, and
+that he would accept the two hundred.
+
+Bill brightened right up at that and thanked him for putting it so clear
+and removing the doubts that had been worrying him. Said that he could
+speculate with a clear conscience after listening to the Deacon's able
+exposition of the subject. Was only sorry he hadn't seen him to talk it
+over before breakfast, as the two hundred had been lying so heavy on his
+mind all night that he'd got up early and mailed a check for it to the
+Deacon's pastor and told him to spend it on his poor.
+
+Zeke took the evening train home in order to pry that check out of the
+elder, but old Doc. Hoover was a pretty quick stepper himself and he'd
+blown the whole two hundred as soon as he got it, buying winter coal for
+poor people.
+
+I simply mention the Deacon in passing as an example of the fact that
+it's easy for a man who thinks he's all right to go all wrong when he
+sees a couple of hundred dollars lying around loose a little to one side
+of the straight and narrow path; and that when he reaches down to pick
+up the money there's usually a string tied to it and a small boy in the
+bushes to give it a yank. Easy-come money never draws interest;
+easy-borrowed dollars pay usury.
+
+Of course, the Board of Trade and every other commercial exchange have
+their legitimate uses, but all you need to know just now is that
+speculation by a fellow who never owns more pork at a time than he sees
+on his breakfast plate isn't one of them. When you become a packer you
+may go on 'Change as a trader; until then you can go there only as a
+sucker.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 15            |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at       |
+                  |  the Union Stock Yards      |
+                  |  in Chicago, to his son,    |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at The Scrub   |
+                  |  Oaks, Spring Lake,         |
+                  |  Michigan. Mr. Pierrepont   |
+                  |  has been promoted again,   |
+                  |  and the old man sends him  |
+                  |  a little advice with his   |
+                  |  appointment.               |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              XV
+
+
+                                       CHICAGO, September 1, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ I judge from yours of the twenty-ninth that you must
+have the black bass in those parts pretty well terrorized. I never could
+quite figure it out, but there seems to be something about a fish that
+makes even a cold-water deacon see double. I reckon it must be that
+while Eve was learning the first principles of dressmaking from the
+snake, Adam was off bass fishing and keeping his end up by learning how
+to lie.
+
+Don't overstock yourself with those four-pound fish yarns, though,
+because the boys have been bringing them back from their vacations till
+we've got enough to last us for a year of Fridays. And if you're sending
+them to keep in practice, you might as well quit, because we've decided
+to take you off the road when you come back, and make you assistant
+manager of the lard department. The salary will be fifty dollars a
+week, and the duties of the position to do your work so well that the
+manager can't run the department without you, and that you can run the
+department without the manager.
+
+To do this you will have to know lard; to know yourself; and to know
+those under you. To some fellows lard is just hog fat, and not always
+that, if they would rather make a dollar to-day than five to-morrow. But
+it was a good deal more to Jack Summers, who held your new job until we
+had to promote him to canned goods.
+
+Jack knew lard from the hog to the frying pan; was up on lard in history
+and religion; originated what he called the "Ham and" theory, proving
+that Moses' injunction against pork must have been dissolved by the
+Circuit Court, because Noah included a couple of shoats in his cargo,
+and called one of his sons Ham, out of gratitude, probably, after
+tasting a slice broiled for the first time; argued that all the great
+nations lived on fried food, and that America was the greatest of them
+all, owing to the energy-producing qualities of pie, liberally shortened
+with lard.
+
+It almost broke Jack's heart when we decided to manufacture our new
+cottonseed oil product, Seedoiline. But on reflection he saw that it
+just gave him an extra hold on the heathen that he couldn't convert to
+lard, and he started right out for the Hebrew and vegetarian vote. Jack
+had enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is the best shortening for any job; it
+makes heavy work light.
+
+A good many young fellows envy their boss because they think he makes the
+rules and can do as he pleases. As a matter of fact, he's the only man in
+the shop who can't. He's like the fellow on the tight-rope--there's plenty
+of scenery under him and lots of room around him, but he's got to keep his
+feet on the wire all the time and travel straight ahead.
+
+A clerk has just one boss to answer to--the manager. But the manager has
+just as many bosses as he has clerks under him. He can make rules, but
+he's the only man who can't afford to break them now and then. A fellow
+is a boss simply because he's a better man than those under him, and
+there's a heap of responsibility in being better than the next fellow.
+
+No man can ask more than he gives. A fellow who can't take orders can't
+give them. If his rules are too hard for him to mind, you can bet they
+are too hard for the clerks who don't get half so much for minding them
+as he does. There's no alarm clock for the sleepy man like an early
+rising manager; and there's nothing breeds work in an office like a busy
+boss.
+
+Of course, setting a good example is just a small part of a manager's
+duties. It's not enough to settle yourself firm on the box seat--you
+must have every man under you hitched up right and well in hand. You
+can't work individuals by general rules. Every man is a special case and
+needs a special pill.
+
+When you fix up a snug little nest for a Plymouth Rock hen and encourage
+her with a nice porcelain egg, it doesn't always follow that she has
+reached the fricassee age because she doesn't lay right off. Sometimes
+she will respond to a little red pepper in her food.
+
+I don't mean by this that you ever want to drive your men, because the
+lash always leaves its worst soreness under the skin. A hundred men will
+forgive a blow in the face where one will a blow to his self-esteem.
+Tell a man the truth about himself and shame the devil if you want to,
+but you won't shame the man you're trying to reach, because he won't
+believe you. But if you can start him on the road that will lead him to
+the truth he's mighty apt to try to reform himself before any one else
+finds him out.
+
+Consider carefully before you say a hard word to a man, but never let a
+chance to say a good one go by. Praise judiciously bestowed is money
+invested.
+
+Never learn anything about your men except from themselves. A good
+manager needs no detectives, and the fellow who can't read human nature
+can't manage it. The phonograph records of a fellow's character are
+lined in his face, and a man's days tell the secrets of his nights.
+
+Be slow to hire and quick to fire. The time to discover incompatibility
+of temper and curl-papers is before the marriage ceremony. But when you
+find that you've hired the wrong man, you can't get rid of him too
+quick. Pay him an extra month, but don't let him stay another day. A
+discharged clerk in the office is like a splinter in the thumb--a centre
+of soreness. There are no exceptions to this rule, because there are no
+exceptions to human nature.
+
+Never threaten, because a threat is a promise to pay that it isn't
+always convenient to meet, but if you don't make it good it hurts your
+credit. Save a threat till you're ready to act, and then you won't need
+it. In all your dealings, remember that to-day is your opportunity;
+to-morrow some other fellow's.
+
+Keep close to your men. When a fellow's sitting on top of a mountain
+he's in a mighty dignified and exalted position, but if he's gazing at
+the clouds, he's missing a heap of interesting and important doings down
+in the valley. Never lose your dignity, of course, but tie it up in all
+the red tape you can find around the office, and tuck it away in the
+safe. It's easy for a boss to awe his clerks, but a man who is feared to
+his face is hated behind his back. A competent boss can move among his
+men without having to draw an imaginary line between them, because they
+will see the real one if it exists.
+
+Besides keeping in touch with your office men, you want to feel your
+salesmen all the time. Send each of them a letter every day so that
+they won't forget that we are making goods for which we need orders; and
+insist on their sending you a line every day, whether they have anything
+to say or not. When a fellow has to write in six times a week to the
+house, he uses up his explanations mighty fast, and he's pretty apt to
+hustle for business to make his seventh letter interesting.
+
+Right here I want to repeat that in keeping track of others and their
+faults it's very, very important that you shouldn't lose sight of your
+own. Authority swells up some fellows so that they can't see their
+corns; but a wise man tries to cure his own while remembering not to
+tread on his neighbors'.
+
+[Illustration: "_A good many salesmen have an idea that buyers are only
+interested in funny stories._"]
+
+In this connection, the story of Lemuel Hostitter, who kept the corner
+grocery in my old town, naturally comes to mind. Lem was probably the
+meanest white man in the State of Missouri, and it wasn't any walk-over
+to hold the belt in those days. Most grocers were satisfied to adulterate
+their coffee with ground peas, but Lem was so blamed mean that he
+adulterated the peas first. Bought skin-bruised hams and claimed that
+the bruise was his private and particular brand, stamped in the skin,
+showing that they were a fancy article, packed expressly for his fancy
+family trade. Ran a soda-water fountain in the front of his store with
+home-made syrups that ate the lining out of the children's stomachs, and
+a blind tiger in the back room with moonshine whiskey that pickled their
+daddies' insides. Take it by and large, Lem's character smelled about as
+various as his store, and that wasn't perfumed with lily-of-the-valley,
+you bet.
+
+One time and another most men dropped into Lem's store of an evening,
+because there wasn't any other place to go and swap lies about the crops
+and any of the neighbors who didn't happen to be there. As Lem was
+always around, in the end he was the only man in town whose meanness
+hadn't been talked over in that grocery. Naturally, he began to think
+that he was the only decent white man in the county. Got to shaking his
+head and reckoning that the town was plum rotten. Said that such goings
+on would make a pessimist of a goat. Wanted to know if public opinion
+couldn't be aroused so that decency would have a show in the village.
+
+Most men get information when they ask for it, and in the end Lem
+fetched public opinion all right. One night the local chapter of the
+W.C.T.U. borrowed all the loose hatchets in town and made a good, clean,
+workmanlike job of the back part of his store, though his whiskey was so
+mean that even the ground couldn't soak it up. The noise brought out the
+men, and they sort of caught the spirit of the happy occasion. When they
+were through, Lem's stock and fixtures looked mighty sick, and they had
+Lem on a rail headed for the county line.
+
+I don't know when I've seen a more surprised man than Lem. He couldn't
+cuss even. But as he never came back, to ask for any explanation, I
+reckon he figured it out that they wanted to get rid of him because he
+was too good for the town.
+
+I simply mention Lem in passing as an example of the fact that when
+you're through sizing up the other fellow, it's a good thing to step
+back from yourself and see how you look. Then add fifty per cent. to
+your estimate of your neighbor for virtues that you can't see, and
+deduct fifty per cent. from yourself for faults that you've missed in
+your inventory, and you'll have a pretty accurate result.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 16            |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at the   |
+                  |  Schweitzerkasenhof,        |
+                  |  Karlsbad, Austria, to his  |
+                  |  son, Pierrepont, at the    |
+                  |  Union Stock Yards,         |
+                  |  Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont    |
+                  |  has shown mild symptoms    |
+                  |  of an attack of society    |
+                  |  fever, and his father is   |
+                  |  administering some simple  |
+                  |  remedies.                  |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              XVI
+
+
+                                        KARLSBAD, October 6, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ If you happen to run across Doc Titherington you'd
+better tell him to go into training, because I expect to be strong
+enough to lick him by the time I get back. Between that ten-day boat
+which he recommended and these Dutch doctors, I'm almost well and about
+broke. You don't really have to take the baths here to get rid of your
+rheumatism--their bills scare it out of a fellow.
+
+They tell me we had a pretty quiet trip across, and I'm not saying that
+we didn't, because for the first three days I was so busy holding myself
+in my berth that I couldn't get a chance to look out the porthole to see
+for myself. I reckon there isn't anything alive that can beat me at
+being seasick, unless it's a camel, and he's got three stomachs.
+
+When I did get around I was a good deal of a maverick--for all the old
+fellows were playing poker in the smoking-room and all the young ones
+were lallygagging under the boats--until I found that we were carrying a
+couple of hundred steers between decks. They looked mighty homesick, you
+bet, and I reckon they sort of sized me up as being a long ways from
+Chicago, for we cottoned to each other right from the start. Take 'em as
+they ran, they were a mighty likely bunch of steers, and I got a heap of
+solid comfort out of them. There must have been good money in them, too,
+for they reached England in prime condition.
+
+I wish you would tell our people at the Beef House to look into this
+export cattle business, and have all the facts and figures ready for me
+when I get back. There seems to be a good margin in it, and with our
+English house we are fixed up to handle it all right at this end. It
+makes me mighty sick to think that we've been sitting back on our
+hindlegs and letting the other fellow run away with this trade. We are
+packers, I know, but that's no reason why we can't be shippers, too. I
+want to milk the critter coming and going, twice a day, and milk her
+dry. Unless you do the whole thing you can't do anything in business as
+it runs to-day. There's still plenty of room at the top, but there isn't
+much anywheres else.
+
+There may be reasons why we haven't been able to tackle this exporting
+of live cattle, but you can tell our people there that they have got to
+be mighty good reasons to wipe out the profit I see in it. Of course, I
+may have missed them, for I've only looked into the business a little by
+way of recreation, but it won't do to say that it's not in our line,
+because anything which carries a profit on four legs is in our line.
+
+I dwell a little on the matter because, while this special case is out
+of your department, the general principle is in it. The way to think of
+a thing in business is to think of it first, and the way to get a share
+of the trade is to go for all of it. Half the battle's in being on the
+hilltop first; and the other half's in staying there. In speaking of
+these matters, and in writing you about your new job, I've run a little
+ahead of your present position, because I'm counting on you to catch up
+with me. But you want to get it clearly in mind that I'm writing to you
+not as the head of the house, but as the head of the family, and that I
+don't propose to mix the two things.
+
+Even as assistant manager of the lard department, you don't occupy a
+very important position with us yet. But the great trouble with some
+fellows is that a little success goes to their heads. Instead of hiding
+their authority behind their backs and trying to get close to their men,
+they use it as a club to keep them off. And a boss with a case of
+big-head will fill an office full of sore heads.
+
+I don't know any one who has better opportunities for making himself
+unpopular than an assistant, for the clerks are apt to cuss him for all
+the manager's meanness, and the manager is likely to find fault with him
+for all the clerks' cussedness. But if he explains his orders to the
+clerks he loses his authority, and if he excuses himself to the manager
+he loses his usefulness. A manager needs an assistant to take trouble
+from him, not to bring it to him.
+
+The one important thing for you to remember all the time is not to
+forget. It's easier for a boss to do a thing himself than to tell some
+one twice to do it. Petty details take up just as much room in a
+manager's head as big ideas; and the more of the first you store for
+him, the more warehouse room you leave him for the second. When a boss
+has to spend his days swearing at his assistant and the clerks have to
+sit up nights hating him, they haven't much time left to swear by the
+house. Satisfaction is the oil of the business machine.
+
+Some fellows can only see those above them, and others can only see
+those under them, but a good man is cross-eyed and can see both ends at
+once. An assistant who becomes his manager's right hand is going to find
+the left hand helping him; and it's not hard for a clerk to find good
+points in a boss who finds good ones in him. Pulling from above and
+boosting from below make climbing easy.
+
+In handling men, your own feelings are the only ones that are of no
+importance. I don't mean by this that you want to sacrifice your
+self-respect, but you must keep in mind that the bigger the position the
+broader the man must be to fill it. And a diet of courtesy and
+consideration gives girth to a boss.
+
+Of course, all this is going to take so much time and thought that you
+won't have a very wide margin left for golf--especially in the
+afternoons. I simply mention this in passing, because I see in the
+Chicago papers which have been sent me that you were among the players
+on the links one afternoon a fortnight ago. Golf's a nice, foolish game,
+and there ain't any harm in it so far as I know except for the
+balls--the stiff balls at the beginning, the lost balls in the middle,
+and the highballs at the end of the game. But a young fellow who wants
+to be a boss butcher hasn't much daylight to waste on any kind of links
+except sausage links.
+
+Of course, a man should have a certain amount of play, just as a boy is
+entitled to a piece of pie at the end of his dinner, but he don't want
+to make a meal of it. Any one who lets sinkers take the place of bread
+and meat gets bilious pretty young; and these fellows who haven't any
+job, except to blow the old man's dollars, are a good deal like the
+little niggers in the pie-eating contest at the County Fair--they've
+a-plenty of pastry and they're attracting a heap of attention, but
+they've got a stomach-ache coming to them by and by.
+
+I want to caution you right here against getting the society bug in your
+head. I'd sooner you'd smoke these Turkish cigarettes which smell like a
+fire in the fertilizer factory. You're going to meet a good many stray
+fools in the course of business every day without going out to hunt up
+the main herd after dark.
+
+Everybody over here in Europe thinks that we haven't any society in
+America, and a power of people in New York think that we haven't any
+society in Chicago. But so far as I can see there are just as many
+ninety-nine-cent men spending million-dollar incomes in one place as
+another; and the rules that govern the game seem to be the same in all
+three places--you've got to be a descendant to belong, and the farther
+you descend the harder you belong. The only difference is that, in
+Europe, the ancestor who made money enough so that his family could
+descend, has been dead so long that they have forgotten his shop; in
+New York he's so recent that they can only pretend to have forgotten it;
+but in Chicago they can't lose it because the ancestor is hustling on
+the Board of Trade or out at the Stock Yards. I want to say right here
+that I don't propose to be an ancestor until after I'm dead. Then, if
+you want to have some fellow whose grandfather sold bad whiskey to the
+Indians sniff and smell pork when you come into the room, you can suit
+yourself.
+
+Of course, I may be off in sizing this thing up, because it's a little
+out of my line. But it's been my experience that these people who think
+that they are all the choice cuts off the critter, and that the rest of
+us are only fit for sausage, are usually chuck steak when you get them
+under the knife. I've tried two or three of them, who had gone broke, in
+the office, but when you separate them from their money there's nothing
+left, not even their friends.
+
+I never see a fellow trying to crawl or to buy his way into society that
+I don't think of my old friend Hank Smith and his wife Kate--Kate Botts
+she was before he married her--and how they tried to butt their way
+through the upper crust.
+
+Hank and I were boys together in Missouri, and he stayed along in the
+old town after I left. I heard of him on and off as tending store a
+little, and farming a little, and loafing a good deal. Then I forgot all
+about him, until one day a few years ago when he turned up in the papers
+as Captain Henry Smith, the Klondike Gold King, just back from Circle
+City, with a million in dust and anything you please in claims. There's
+never any limit to what a miner may be worth in those, except his
+imagination.
+
+I was a little puzzled when, a week later, my office boy brought me a
+card reading Colonel Henry Augustus Bottes-Smythe, but I supposed it was
+some distinguished foreigner who had come to size me up so that he could
+round out his roast on Chicago in his new book, and I told the boy to
+show the General in.
+
+I've got a pretty good memory for faces, and I'd bought too much store
+plug of Hank in my time not to know him, even with a clean shave and a
+plug hat. Some men dry up with success, but it was just spouting out of
+Hank. Told me he'd made his pile and that he was tired of living on the
+slag heap; that he'd spent his whole life where money hardly whispered,
+let alone talked, and he was going now where it would shout. Wanted to
+know what was the use of being a nob if a fellow wasn't the nobbiest
+sort of a nob. Said he'd bought a house on Beacon Hill, in Boston, and
+that if I'd prick up my ears occasionally I'd hear something drop into
+the Back Bay. Handed me his new card four times and explained that it
+was the rawest sort of dog to carry a brace of names in your card
+holster; that it gave you the drop on the swells every time, and that
+they just had to throw up both hands and pass you the pot when you
+showed down. Said that Bottes was old English for Botts, and that Smythe
+was new American for Smith; the Augustus was just a fancy touch, a sort
+of high-card kicker.
+
+I didn't explain to Hank, because it was congratulations and not
+explanations that he wanted, and I make it a point to show a customer
+the line of goods that he's looking for. And I never heard the full
+particulars of his experiences in the East, though, from what I learned
+afterward, Hank struck Boston with a bang, all right.
+
+He located his claim on Beacon Hill, between a Mayflower descendant and
+a Declaration Signer's great-grandson, breeds which believe that when
+the Lord made them He was through, and that the rest of us just
+happened. And he hadn't been in town two hours before he started in to
+make improvements. There was a high wrought-iron railing in front of his
+house, and he had that gilded first thing, because, as he said, he
+wasn't running a receiving vault and he didn't want any mistakes. Then
+he bought a nice, open barouche, had the wheels painted red, hired a
+nigger coachman and started out in style to be sociable and get
+acquainted. Left his card all the way down one side of Beacon Street,
+and then drove back leaving it on the other. Everywhere he stopped he
+found that the whole family was out. Kept it up a week, on and off, but
+didn't seem to have any luck. Thought that the men must be hot sports
+and the women great gadders to keep on the jump so much. Allowed that
+they were the liveliest little lot of fleas that he had ever chased.
+Decided to quit trying to nail 'em one at a time, and planned out
+something that he reckoned would round up the whole bunch.
+
+Hank sent out a thousand invitations to his grand opening, as he called
+it; left one at every house within a mile. Had a brass band on the front
+steps and fireworks on the roof. Ordered forty kegs from the brewery
+and hired a fancy mixer to sling together mild snorts, as he called
+them, for the ladies. They tell me that, when the band got to going good
+on the steps and the fireworks on the roof, even Beacon Street looked
+out the windows to see what was doing. There must have been ten thousand
+people in the street and not a soul but Hank and his wife and the mixer
+in the house. Some one yelled speech, and then the whole crowd took it
+up, till Hank came out on the steps. He shut off the band with one hand
+and stopped the fireworks with the other. Said that speechmaking wasn't
+his strangle-hold; that he'd been living on snowballs in the Klondike
+for so long that his gas-pipe was frozen; but that this welcome started
+the ice and he thought about three fingers of the plumber's favorite
+prescription would cut out the frost. Would the crowd join him? He had
+invited a few friends in for the evening, but there seemed to be some
+misunderstanding about the date, and he hated to have good stuff curdle
+on his hands.
+
+While this was going on, the Mayflower descendant was telephoning for
+the police from one side and the Signer's great-grandson from the other,
+and just as the crowd yelled and broke for the house two patrol wagons
+full of policemen got there. But they had to turn in a riot call and
+bring out the reserves before they could break up Hank's little Boston
+tea-party.
+
+After all, Hank did what he started out to do with his party--rounded up
+all his neighbors in a bunch, though not exactly according to schedule.
+For next morning there were so many descendants and great-grandsons in
+the police court to prefer charges that it looked like a reunion of the
+Pilgrim Fathers. The Judge fined Hank on sixteen counts and bound him
+over to keep the peace for a hundred years. That afternoon he left for
+the West on a special, because the Limited didn't get there quick
+enough. But before going he tacked on the front door of his house a sign
+which read:
+
+     "Neighbors paying their party calls will please not heave rocks
+     through windows to attract attention. Not in and not going to be.
+     Gone back to Circle City for a little quiet.
+
+                                                "Yours truly,
+                                                     "HANK SMITH.
+
+          "N.B.--Too swift for your uncle."
+
+Hank dropped by my office for a minute on his way to 'Frisco. Said he
+liked things lively, but there was altogether too much rough-house on
+Beacon Hill for him. Judged that as the crowd which wasn't invited was
+so blamed sociable, the one which was invited would have stayed a week
+if it hadn't slipped up on the date. That might be the Boston idea, but
+he wanted a little more refinement in his. Said he was a pretty free
+spender, and would hold his end up, but he hated a hog. Of course I told
+Hank that Boston wasn't all that it was cracked up to be in the school
+histories, and that Circle City wasn't so tough as it read in the
+newspapers, for there was no way of making him understand that he might
+have lived in Boston for a hundred years without being invited to a
+strawberry sociable. Because a fellow cuts ice on the Arctic Circle, it
+doesn't follow that he's going to be worth beans on the Back Bay.
+
+I simply mention Hank in a general way. His case may be a little
+different, but it isn't any more extreme than lots of others all around
+you over there and me over here. Of course, I want you to enjoy good
+society, but any society is good society where congenial men and women
+meet together for wholesome amusement. But I want you to keep away from
+people who choose play for a profession. A man's as good as he makes
+himself, but no man's any good because his grandfather was.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |          No. 17            |
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at the  |
+                  |  London House of Graham &  |
+                  |  Co., to his son,          |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at the Union  |
+                  |  Stock Yards in Chicago.   |
+                  |  Mr. Pierrepont has        |
+                  |  written his father that   |
+                  |  he is getting along       |
+                  |  famously in his new       |
+                  |  place.                    |
+                  +----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              XVII
+
+
+                                         LONDON, October 24, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ Well, I'm headed for home at last, checked high and
+as full of prance as a spotted circus horse. Those Dutchmen ain't so bad
+as their language, after all, for they've fixed up my rheumatism so that
+I can bear down on my right leg without thinking that it's going to
+break off.
+
+I'm glad to learn from your letter that you're getting along so well in
+your new place, and I hope that when I get home your boss will back up
+all the good things which you say about yourself. For the future,
+however, you needn't bother to keep me posted along this line. It's the
+one subject on which most men are perfectly frank, and it's about the
+only one on which it isn't necessary to be. There's never any use trying
+to hide the fact that you're a jim-dandy--you're bound to be found out.
+Of course, you want to have your eyes open all the time for a good man,
+but follow the old maid's example--look under the bed and in the closet,
+not in the mirror, for him. A man who does big things is too busy to
+talk about them. When the jaws really need exercise, chew gum.
+
+Some men go through life on the Sarsaparilla Theory--that they've got to
+give a hundred doses of talk about themselves for every dollar which
+they take in; and that's a pretty good theory when you're getting a
+dollar for ten cents' worth of ingredients. But a man who's giving a
+dollar's worth of himself for ninety-nine cents doesn't need to throw in
+any explanations.
+
+Of course, you're going to meet fellows right along who pass as good men
+for a while, because they say they're good men; just as a lot of fives
+are in circulation which are accepted at their face value until they
+work up to the receiving teller. And you're going to see these men
+taking buzzards and coining eagles from them that will fool people so
+long as they can keep them in the air; but sooner or later they're bound
+to swoop back to their dead horse, and you'll get the buzzard smell.
+
+Hot air can take up a balloon a long ways, but it can't keep it there.
+And when a fellow's turning flip-flops up among the clouds, he's
+naturally going to have the farmers gaping at him. But in the end there
+always comes a time when the parachute fails to work. I don't know
+anything that's quite so dead as a man who's fallen three or four
+thousand feet off the edge of a cloud.
+
+The only way to gratify a taste for scenery is to climb a mountain. You
+don't get up so quick, but you don't come down so sudden. Even then,
+there's a chance that a fellow may slip and fall over a precipice, but
+not unless he's foolish enough to try short-cuts over slippery places;
+though some men can manage to fall down the hall stairs and break their
+necks. The path isn't the shortest way to the top, but it's usually the
+safest way.
+
+Life isn't a spurt, but a long, steady climb. You can't run far up-hill
+without stopping to sit down. Some men do a day's work and then spend
+six lolling around admiring it. They rush at a thing with a whoop and
+use up all their wind in that. And when they're rested and have got it
+back, they whoop again and start off in a new direction. They mistake
+intention for determination, and after they have told you what they
+propose to do and get right up to doing it, they simply peter out.
+
+I've heard a good deal in my time about the foolishness of hens, but
+when it comes to right-down, plum foolishness, give me a rooster, every
+time. He's always strutting and stretching and crowing and bragging
+about things with which he had nothing to do. When the sun rises, you'd
+think that he was making all the light, instead of all the noise; when
+the farmer's wife throws the scraps in the henyard, he crows as if he
+was the provider for the whole farmyard and was asking a blessing on the
+food; when he meets another rooster, he crows; and when the other
+rooster licks him, he crows; and so he keeps it up straight through the
+day. He even wakes up during the night and crows a little on general
+principles. But when you hear from a hen, she's laid an egg, and she
+don't make a great deal of noise about it, either.
+
+I speak of these things in a general way, because I want you to keep in
+mind all the time that steady, quiet, persistent, plain work can't be
+imitated or replaced by anything just as good, and because your request
+for a job for Courtland Warrington naturally brings them up. You write
+that Court says that a man who has occupied his position in the world
+naturally can't cheapen himself by stepping down into any little
+piddling job where he'd have to do undignified things.
+
+I want to start right out by saying that I know Court and his whole
+breed like a glue factory, and that we can't use him in our business.
+He's one of those fellows who start in at the top and naturally work
+down to the bottom, because that is where they belong. His father gave
+him an interest in the concern when he left college, and since the old
+man failed three years ago and took a salary himself, Court's been
+sponging on him and waiting for a nice, dignified job to come along and
+steal him. But we are not in the kidnapping business.
+
+The only undignified job I know of is loafing, and nothing can cheapen a
+man who sponges instead of hunting any sort of work, because he's as
+cheap already as they can be made. I never could quite understand these
+fellows who keep down every decent instinct in order to keep up
+appearance, and who will stoop to any sort of real meanness to boost up
+their false pride.
+
+[Illustration: "_Jim Hicks dared Fatty Wilkins to eat a piece of
+dirt._"]
+
+They always remind me of little Fatty Wilkins, who came to live in our
+town back in Missouri when I was a boy. His mother thought a heap of Fatty,
+and Fatty thought a heap of himself, or his stomach, which was the same
+thing. Looked like he'd been taken from a joke book. Used to be a great
+eater. Stuffed himself till his hide was stretched as tight as a sausage
+skin, and then howled for painkiller. Spent all his pennies for cakes,
+because candy wasn't filling enough. Hogged 'em in the shop, for fear he
+would have to give some one a bite if he ate them on the street.
+
+The other boys didn't take to Fatty, and they didn't make any special
+secret of it when he was around. He was a mighty brave boy and a mighty
+strong boy and a mighty proud boy--with his mouth; but he always managed
+to slip out of anything that looked like a fight by having a sore hand
+or a case of the mumps. The truth of the matter was that he was afraid
+of everything except food, and that was the thing which was hurting him
+most. It's mighty seldom that a fellow's afraid of what he ought to be
+afraid of in this world.
+
+Of course, like most cowards, while Fatty always had an excuse for not
+doing something that might hurt his skin, he would take a dare to do
+anything that would hurt his self-respect, for fear the boys would laugh
+at him, or say that he was afraid, if he refused. So one day during
+recess Jim Hicks dared him to eat a piece of dirt. Fatty hesitated a
+little, because, while he was pretty promiscuous about what he put into
+his stomach, he had never included dirt in his bill-of-fare. But when
+the boys began to say that he was afraid, Fatty up and swallowed it.
+
+And when he dared the other boys to do the same thing and none of them
+would take the dare, it made him mighty proud and puffed up. Got to
+charging the bigger boys and the lounger around the post-office a cent
+to see him eat a piece of dirt the size of a hickory-nut. Found there
+was good money in that, and added grasshoppers, at two cents apiece, as
+a side line. Found them so popular that he took on chinch bugs at a
+nickel, and fairly coined money. The last I heard of Fatty he was in a
+Dime Museum, drawing two salaries--one as "The Fat Man," and the other
+as "Launcelot, The Locust Eater, the Only Man Alive with a Gizzard."
+
+You are going to meet a heap of Fatties, first and last, fellows who'll
+eat a little dirt "for fun" or to show off, and who'll eat a little more
+because they find that there's some easy money or times in it. It's hard
+to get at these men, because when they've lost everything they had to be
+proud of, they still keep their pride. You can always bet that when a
+fellow's pride makes him touchy, it's because there are some mighty raw
+spots on it.
+
+It's been my experience that pride is usually a spur to the strong and a
+drag on the weak. It drives the strong man along and holds the weak one
+back. It makes the fellow with the stiff upper lip and the square jaw
+smile at a laugh and laugh at a sneer; it keeps his conscience straight
+and his back humped over his work; it makes him appreciate the little
+things and fight for the big ones. But it makes the fellow with the
+retreating forehead do the thing that looks right, instead of the thing
+that is right; it makes him fear a laugh and shrivel up at a sneer; it
+makes him live to-day on to-morrow's salary; it makes him a cheap
+imitation of some Willie who has a little more money than he has,
+without giving him zip enough to go out and force luck for himself.
+
+I never see one of these fellows swelling around with their petty
+larceny pride that I don't think of a little experience of mine when I
+was a boy. An old fellow caught me lifting a watermelon in his patch,
+one afternoon, and instead of cuffing me and letting me go, as I had
+expected if I got caught, he led me home by the ear to my ma, and told
+her what I had been up to.
+
+Your grandma had been raised on the old-fashioned plan, and she had
+never heard of these new-fangled theories of reasoning gently with a
+child till its under lip begins to stick out and its eyes to fill with
+tears as it sees the error of its ways. She fetched the tears all right,
+but she did it with a trunk strap or a slipper. And your grandma was a
+pretty substantial woman. Nothing of the tootsey-wootsey about her foot,
+and nothing of the airy-fairy trifle about her slipper. When she was
+through I knew that I'd been licked--polished right off to a point--and
+then she sent me to my room and told me not to poke my nose out of it
+till I could recite the Ten Commandments and the Sunday-school lesson by
+heart.
+
+There was a whole chapter of it, and an Old Testament chapter at that,
+but I laid right into it because I knew ma, and supper was only two
+hours off. I can repeat that chapter still, forward and backward,
+without missing a word or stopping to catch my breath.
+
+Every now and then old Doc Hoover used to come into the Sunday-school
+room and scare the scholars into fits by going around from class to
+class and asking questions. That next Sunday, for the first time, I was
+glad to see him happen in, and I didn't try to escape attention when he
+worked around to our class. For ten minutes I'd been busting for him to
+ask me to recite a verse of the lesson, and, when he did, I simply cut
+loose and recited the whole chapter and threw in the Ten Commandments
+for good measure. It sort of dazed the Doc, because he had come to me
+for information about the Old Testament before, and we'd never got much
+beyond, And Ahab begat Jahab, or words to that effect. But when he got
+over the shock he made me stand right up before the whole school and do
+it again. Patted me on the head and said I was "an honor to my parents
+and an example to my playmates."
+
+I had been looking down all the time, feeling mighty proud and scared,
+but at that I couldn't help glancing up to see the other boys admire me.
+But the first person my eye lit on was your grandma, standing in the
+back of the room, where she had stopped for a moment on her way up to
+church, and glaring at me in a mighty unpleasant way.
+
+"Tell 'em, John," she said right out loud, before everybody.
+
+There was no way to run, for the Elder had hold of my hand, and there
+was no place to hide, though I reckon I could have crawled into a rat
+hole. So, to gain time, I blurted out:
+
+"Tell 'em what, mam?"
+
+"Tell 'em how you come to have your lesson so nice."
+
+I learned to hate notoriety right then and there, but I knew there was
+no switching her off on to the weather when she wanted to talk
+religion. So I shut my eyes and let it come, though it caught on my
+palate once or twice on the way out.
+
+"Hooked a watermelon, mam."
+
+There wasn't any need for further particulars with that crowd, and they
+simply howled. Ma led me up to our pew, allowing that she'd tend to me
+Monday for disgracing her in public that way--and she did.
+
+That was a twelve-grain dose, without any sugar coat, but it sweat more
+cant and false pride out of my system than I could get back into it for
+the next twenty years. I learned right there how to be humble, which is
+a heap more important than knowing how to be proud. There are mighty few
+men that need any lessons in that.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 18            |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at the   |
+                  |  London House of Graham &   |
+                  |  Co., to his son,           |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at the Union   |
+                  |  Stock Yards in Chicago.    |
+                  |  Mr. Pierrepont is worried  |
+                  |  over rumors that the old   |
+                  |  man is a bear on lard,     |
+                  |  and that the longs are     |
+                  |  about to make him climb a  |
+                  |  tree.                      |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              XVIII
+
+
+                                         LONDON, October 27, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ Yours of the twenty-first inst. to hand and I note
+the inclosed clippings. You needn't pay any special attention to this
+newspaper talk about the Comstock crowd having caught me short a big
+line of November lard. I never sell goods without knowing where I can
+find them when I want them, and if these fellows try to put their
+forefeet in the trough, or start any shoving and crowding, they're going
+to find me forgetting my table manners, too. For when it comes to funny
+business I'm something of a humorist myself. And while I'm too old to
+run, I'm young enough to stand and fight.
+
+First and last, a good many men have gone gunning for me, but they've
+always planned the obsequies before they caught the deceased. I reckon
+there hasn't been a time in twenty years when there wasn't a nice
+"Gates Ajar" piece all made up and ready for me in some office near the
+Board of Trade. But the first essential of a quiet funeral is a willing
+corpse. And I'm still sitting up and taking nourishment.
+
+There are two things you never want to pay any attention to--abuse and
+flattery. The first can't harm you and the second can't help you. Some
+men are like yellow dogs--when you're coming toward them they'll jump up
+and try to lick your hands; and when you're walking away from them
+they'll sneak up behind and snap at your heels. Last year, when I was
+bulling the market, the longs all said that I was a kind-hearted old
+philanthropist, who was laying awake nights scheming to get the farmers
+a top price for their hogs; and the shorts allowed that I was an
+infamous old robber, who was stealing the pork out of the workingman's
+pot. As long as you can't please both sides in this world, there's
+nothing like pleasing your own side.
+
+There are mighty few people who can see any side to a thing except their
+own side. I remember once I had a vacant lot out on the Avenue, and a
+lady came in to my office and in a soothing-syrupy way asked if I would
+lend it to her, as she wanted to build a _crèche_ on it. I hesitated a
+little, because I had never heard of a _crèche_ before, and someways it
+sounded sort of foreign and frisky, though the woman looked like a good,
+safe, reliable old heifer. But she explained that a _crèche_ was a baby
+farm, where old maids went to wash and feed and stick pins in other
+people's children while their mothers were off at work. Of course, there
+was nothing in that to get our pastor or the police after me, so I told
+her to go ahead.
+
+She went off happy, but about a week later she dropped in again, looking
+sort of dissatisfied, to find out if I wouldn't build the _crèche_
+itself. It seemed like a worthy object, so I sent some carpenters over
+to knock together a long frame pavilion. She was mighty grateful, you
+bet, and I didn't see her again for a fortnight. Then she called by to
+say that so long as I was in the business and they didn't cost me
+anything special, would I mind giving her a few cows. She had a
+surprised and grieved expression on her face as she talked, and the way
+she put it made me feel that I ought to be ashamed of myself for not
+having thought of the live stock myself. So I threw in half a dozen cows
+to provide the refreshments.
+
+I thought that was pretty good measure, but the carpenters hadn't more
+than finished with the pavilion before the woman telephoned a sharp
+message to ask why I hadn't had it painted.
+
+I was too busy that morning to quarrel, so I sent word that I would fix
+it up; and when I was driving by there next day the painters were hard
+at work on it. There was a sixty-foot frontage of that shed on the
+Avenue, and I saw right off that it was just a natural signboard. So I
+called over the boss painter and between us we cooked up a nice little
+ad that ran something like this:
+
+                        Graham's Extract:
+                    It Makes the Weak Strong.
+
+Well, sir, when she saw the ad next morning that old hen just
+scratched gravel. Went all around town saying that I had given a
+five-hundred-dollar shed to charity and painted a thousand-dollar ad on
+it. Allowed I ought to send my check for that amount to the _crèche_
+fund. Kept at it till I began to think there might be something in it,
+after all, and sent her the money. Then I found a fellow who wanted to
+build in that neighborhood, sold him the lot cheap, and got out of the
+_crèche_ industry.
+
+I've put a good deal more than work into my business, and I've drawn a
+good deal more than money out of it; but the only thing I've ever put
+into it which didn't draw dividends in fun or dollars was worry. That is
+a branch of the trade which you want to leave to our competitors.
+
+I've always found worrying a blamed sight more uncertain than
+horse-racing--it's harder to pick a winner at it. You go home worrying
+because you're afraid that your fool new clerk forgot to lock the safe
+after you, and during the night the lard refinery burns down; you spend
+a year fretting because you think Bill Jones is going to cut you out
+with your best girl, and then you spend ten worrying because he didn't;
+you worry over Charlie at college because he's a little wild, and he
+writes you that he's been elected president of the Y.M.C.A.; and you
+worry over William because he's so pious that you're afraid he's going
+to throw up everything and go to China as a missionary, and he draws on
+you for a hundred; you worry because you're afraid your business is
+going to smash, and your health busts up instead. Worrying is the one
+game in which, if you guess right, you don't get any satisfaction out of
+your smartness. A busy man has no time to bother with it. He can always
+find plenty of old women in skirts or trousers to spend their days
+worrying over their own troubles and to sit up nights waking his.
+
+Speaking of handing over your worries to others naturally calls to mind
+the Widow Williams and her son Bud, who was a playmate of mine when I
+was a boy. Bud was the youngest of the Widow's troubles, and she was a
+woman whose troubles seldom came singly. Had fourteen altogether, and
+four pair of 'em were twins. Used to turn 'em loose in the morning, when
+she let out her cows and pigs to browse along the street, and then she'd
+shed all worry over them for the rest of the day. Allowed that if they
+got hurt the neighbors would bring them home; and that if they got
+hungry they'd come home. And someways, the whole drove always showed up
+safe and dirty about meal time.
+
+I've no doubt she thought a lot of Bud, but when a woman has fourteen it
+sort of unsettles her mind so that she can't focus her affections or
+play any favorites. And so when Bud's clothes were found at the swimming
+hole one day, and no Bud inside them, she didn't take on up to the
+expectations of the neighbors who had brought the news, and who were
+standing around waiting for her to go off into something special in the
+way of high-strikes.
+
+She allowed that they were Bud's clothes, all right, but she wanted to
+know where the remains were. Hinted that there'd be no funeral, or such
+like expensive goings-on, until some one produced the deceased. Take her
+by and large, she was a pretty cool, calm cucumber.
+
+But if she showed a little too much Christian resignation, the rest of
+the town was mightily stirred up over Bud's death, and every one just
+quit work to tell each other what a noble little fellow he was; and how
+his mother hadn't deserved to have such a bright little sunbeam in her
+home; and to drag the river between talks. But they couldn't get a rise.
+
+Through all the worry and excitement the Widow was the only one who
+didn't show any special interest, except to ask for results. But
+finally, at the end of a week, when they'd strained the whole river
+through their drags and hadn't anything to show for it but a collection
+of tin cans and dead catfish, she threw a shawl over her head and went
+down the street to the cabin of Louisiana Clytemnestra, an old yellow
+woman, who would go into a trance for four bits and find a fortune for
+you for a dollar. I reckon she'd have called herself a clairvoyant
+nowadays, but then she was just a voodoo woman.
+
+Well, the Widow said she reckoned that boys ought to be let out as well
+as in for half price, and so she laid down two bits, allowing that she
+wanted a few minutes' private conversation with her Bud. Clytie said
+she'd do her best, but that spirits were mighty snifty and high-toned,
+even when they'd only been poor white trash on earth, and it might make
+them mad to be called away from their high jinks if they were taking a
+little recreation, or from their high-priced New York customers if they
+were working, to tend to cut-rate business. Still, she'd have a try, and
+she did. But after having convulsions for half an hour, she gave it up.
+Reckoned that Bud was up to some cussedness off somewhere, and that he
+wouldn't answer for any two-bits.
+
+[Illustration: "_Elder Hoover was accounted a powerful exhorter in our
+parts._"]
+
+The Widow was badly disappointed, but she allowed that that was just
+like Bud. He'd always been a boy that never could be found when any one
+wanted him. So she went off, saying that she'd had her money's worth in
+seeing Clytie throw those fancy fits. But next day she came again and
+paid down four bits, and Clytie reckoned that that ought to fetch Bud
+sure. Someways though, she didn't have any luck, and finally the Widow
+suggested that she call up Bud's father--Buck Williams had been dead a
+matter of ten years--and the old man responded promptly.
+
+"Where's Bud?" asked the Widow.
+
+Hadn't laid eyes on him. Didn't know he'd come across. Had he joined the
+church before he started?
+
+"No."
+
+Then he'd have to look downstairs for him.
+
+Clytie told the Widow to call again and they'd get him sure. So she came
+back next day and laid down a dollar. That fetched old Buck Williams'
+ghost on the jump, you bet, but he said he hadn't laid eyes on Bud yet.
+They hauled the Sweet By and By with a drag net, but they couldn't get a
+rap from him. Clytie trotted out George Washington, and Napoleon, and
+Billy Patterson, and Ben Franklin, and Captain Kidd, just to show that
+there was no deception, but they couldn't get a whisper even from Bud.
+
+I reckon Clytie had been stringing the old lady along, intending to
+produce Bud's spook as a sort of red-fire, calcium-light,
+grand-march-of-the-Amazons climax, but she didn't get a chance. For
+right there the old lady got up with a mighty set expression around her
+lips and marched out, muttering that it was just as she had thought all
+along--Bud wasn't there. And when the neighbors dropped in that
+afternoon to plan out a memorial service for her "lost lamb," she chased
+them off the lot with a broom. Said that they had looked in the river
+for him and that she had looked beyond the river for him, and that they
+would just stand pat now and wait for him to make the next move. Allowed
+that if she could once get her hands in "that lost lamb's" wool there
+might be an opening for a funeral when she got through with him, but
+there wouldn't be till then. Altogether, it looked as if there was a
+heap of trouble coming to Bud if he had made any mistake and was still
+alive.
+
+The Widow found her "lost lamb" hiding behind a rain-barrel when she
+opened up the house next morning, and there was a mighty touching and
+affecting scene. In fact, the Widow must have touched him at least a
+hundred times and every time he was affected to tears, for she was using
+a bed slat, which is a powerfully strong moral agent for making a boy
+see the error of his ways. And it was a month after that before Bud
+could go down Main Street without some man who had called him a noble
+little fellow, or a bright, manly little chap, while he was drowned,
+reaching out and fetching him a clip on the ear for having come back and
+put the laugh on him.
+
+No one except the Widow ever really got at the straight of Bud's
+conduct, but it appeared that he left home to get a few Indian scalps,
+and that he came back for a little bacon and corn pone.
+
+I simply mention the Widow in passing as an example of the fact that the
+time to do your worrying is when a thing is all over, and that the way
+to do it is to leave it to the neighbors. I sail for home to-morrow.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |          No. 19            |
+                  +----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at the  |
+                  |  New York house of Graham  |
+                  |  & Co., to his son,        |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at the Union  |
+                  |  Stock Yards in Chicago.   |
+                  |  The old man, on the       |
+                  |  voyage home, has met a    |
+                  |  girl who interests him    |
+                  |  and who in turn seems to  |
+                  |  be interested in Mr.      |
+                  |  Pierrepont.               |
+                  +----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              XIX
+
+
+                                       NEW YORK, November 4, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ Who is this Helen Heath, and what are your intentions
+there? She knows a heap more about you than she ought to know if they're
+not serious, and I know a heap less about her than I ought to know if
+they are. Hadn't got out of sight of land before we'd become acquainted
+somehow, and she's been treating me like a father clear across the
+Atlantic. She's a mighty pretty girl, and a mighty nice girl, and a
+mighty sensible girl--in fact she's so exactly the sort of girl I'd like
+to see you marry that I'm afraid there's nothing in it.
+
+Of course, your salary isn't a large one yet, but you can buy a whole
+lot of happiness with fifty dollars a week when you have the right sort
+of a woman for your purchasing agent. And while I don't go much on love
+in a cottage, love in a flat, with fifty a week as a starter, is just
+about right, if the girl is just about right. If she isn't, it doesn't
+make any special difference how you start out, you're going to end up
+all wrong.
+
+Money ought never to be _the_ consideration in marriage, but it always
+ought to be _a_ consideration. When a boy and a girl don't think enough
+about money before the ceremony, they're going to have to think altogether
+too much about it after; and when a man's doing sums at home evenings, it
+comes kind of awkward for him to try to hold his wife on his lap.
+
+There's nothing in this talk that two can live cheaper than one. A good
+wife doubles a man's expenses and doubles his happiness, and that's a
+pretty good investment if a fellow's got the money to invest. I have met
+women who had cut their husband's expenses in half, but they needed the
+money because they had doubled their own. I might add, too, that I've
+met a good many husbands who had cut their wives' expenses in half, and
+they fit naturally into any discussion of our business, because they
+are hogs. There's a point where economy becomes a vice, and that's when
+a man leaves its practice to his wife.
+
+An unmarried man is a good deal like a piece of unimproved real
+estate--he may be worth a whole lot of money, but he isn't of any
+particular use except to build on. The great trouble with a lot of these
+fellows is that they're "made land," and if you dig down a few feet you
+strike ooze and booze under the layer of dollars that their daddies
+dumped in on top. Of course, the only way to deal with a proposition of
+that sort is to drive forty-foot piles clear down to solid rock and then
+to lay railroad iron and cement till you've got something to build on.
+But a lot of women will go right ahead without any preliminaries and
+wonder what's the matter when the walls begin to crack and tumble about
+their ears.
+
+I never come across a case of this sort without thinking of Jack Carter,
+whose father died about ten years ago and left Jack a million dollars,
+and left me as trustee of both until Jack reached his twenty-fifth
+birthday. I didn't relish the job particularly, because Jack was one of
+these charlotte-russe boys, all whipped cream and sponge cake and
+high-priced flavoring extracts, without any filling qualities. There
+wasn't any special harm in him, but there wasn't any special good,
+either, and I always feel that there's more hope for a fellow who's an
+out and out cuss than for one who's simply made up of a lot of little
+trifling meannesses. Jack wore mighty warm clothes and mighty hot vests,
+and the girls all said that he was a perfect dream, but I've never been
+one who could get a great deal of satisfaction out of dreams.
+
+It's mighty seldom that I do an exhibition mile, but the winter after I
+inherited Jack--he was twenty-three years old then--your Ma kept after
+me so strong that I finally put on my fancy harness and let her trot me
+around to a meet at the Ralstons one evening. Of course, I was in the
+Percheron class, and so I just stood around with a lot of heavy old
+draft horses, who ought to have been resting up in their stalls, and
+watched the three-year-olds prance and cavort round the ring. Jack was
+among them, of course, dancing with the youngest Churchill girl, and
+holding her a little tighter, I thought, than was necessary to keep her
+from falling. Had both ends working at once--never missed a stitch with
+his heels and was turning out a steady stream of fancy work with his
+mouth. And all the time he was looking at that girl as intent and eager
+as a Scotch terrier at a rat hole.
+
+I happened just then to be pinned into a corner with two or three women
+who couldn't escape--Edith Curzon, a great big brunette whom I knew Jack
+had been pretty soft on, and little Mabel Moore, a nice roly-poly blonde,
+and it didn't take me long to see that they were watching Jack with a
+hair-pulling itch in their finger-tips. In fact, it looked to me as if
+the young scamp was a good deal more popular than the facts about him,
+as I knew them, warranted him in being.
+
+I slipped out early, but next evening, when I was sitting in my little
+smoking-room, Jack came charging in, and, without any sparring for an
+opening, burst out with:
+
+"Isn't she a stunner, Mr. Graham!"
+
+I allowed that Miss Curzon was something on the stun.
+
+"Miss Curzon, indeed," he sniffed. "She's well enough in a big, black
+way, but Miss Churchill----" and he began to paw the air for adjectives.
+
+"But how was I to know that you meant Miss Churchill?" I answered. "It's
+just a fortnight now since you told me that Miss Curzon was a goddess,
+and that she was going to reign in your life and make it a heaven, or
+something of that sort. I forget just the words, but they were mighty
+beautiful thoughts and did you credit."
+
+"Don't remind me of it," Jack groaned. "It makes me sick every time I
+think what an ass I've been."
+
+I allowed that I felt a little nausea myself, but I told him that this
+time, at least, he'd shown some sense; that Miss Churchill was a mighty
+pretty girl and rich enough so that her liking him didn't prove anything
+worse against her than bad judgment; and that the thing for him to do
+was to quit his foolishness, propose to her, and dance the heel, toe,
+and a one, two, three with her for the rest of his natural days.
+
+Jack hemmed and hawked a little over this, but finally he came out with
+it:
+
+"That's the deuce of it," says he. "I'm in a beastly mess--I want to
+marry her--she's the only girl in the world for me--the only one I've
+ever really loved, and I've proposed--that is, I want to propose to
+her, but I'm engaged to Edith Curzon on the quiet."
+
+"I reckon you'll marry her, then," I said; "because she strikes me as a
+young woman who's not going to lose a million dollars without putting a
+tracer after it."
+
+"And that's not the worst of it," Jack went on.
+
+"Not the worst of it! What do you mean! You haven't married her on the
+quiet, too, have you?"
+
+"No, but there's Mabel Moore, you know."
+
+I didn't know, but I guessed. "You haven't been such a double-barreled
+donkey as to give her an option on yourself, too?"
+
+"No, no; but I've said things to her which she may have misconstrued, if
+she's inclined to be literal."
+
+"You bet she is," I answered. "I never saw a nice, fat, blonde girl who
+took a million-dollar offer as a practical joke. What is it you've said
+to her? 'I love you, darling,' or something about as foxy and
+noncommittal."
+
+"Not that--not that at all; but she may have stretched what I said to
+mean that."
+
+Well, sir, I just laid into that fellow when I heard that, though I
+could see that he didn't think it was refined of me. He'd never made it
+any secret that he thought me a pretty coarse old man, and his face
+showed me now that I was jarring his delicate works.
+
+"I suppose I have been indiscreet," he said, "but I must say I expected
+something different from you, after coming out this way and owning up.
+Of course, if you don't care to help me----"
+
+I cut him short there. "I've got to help you. But I want you to tell me
+the truth. How have you managed to keep this Curzon girl from announcing
+her engagement to you?"
+
+"Well," and there was a scared grin on Jack's face now; "I told her
+that you, as trustee under father's will, had certain unpleasant powers
+over my money--in fact, that most of it would revert to Sis if I married
+against your wishes, and that you disliked her, and that she must work
+herself into your good graces before we could think of announcing our
+engagement."
+
+I saw right off that he had told Mabel Moore the same thing, and that
+was why those two girls had been so blamed polite to me the night
+before. So I rounded on him sudden.
+
+"You're engaged to that Miss Moore, too, aren't you?"
+
+"I'm afraid so."
+
+"Why didn't you come out like a man and say so at first?"
+
+"I couldn't, Mr. Graham. Someways it seemed like piling it up so, and
+you take such a cold-blooded, unsympathetic view of these things."
+
+"Perhaps I do; yes, I'm afraid I do. How far are you committed to Miss
+Churchill?"
+
+Jack cheered right up. "I'm all right there, at least. She hasn't
+answered."
+
+"Then you've asked?"
+
+"Why, so I have; at least she may take it for something like asking. But
+I don't care; I want to be committed there; I can't live without her;
+she's the only----"
+
+I saw that he was beginning to foam up again, so I shut him off straight
+at the spigot. Told him to save it till after the ceremony. Set him down
+to my desk, and dictated two letters, one to Edith Curzon and the other
+to Mabel Moore, and made him sign and seal them, then and there. He
+twisted and squirmed and tried to wiggle off the hook, but I wouldn't
+give him any slack. Made him come right out and say that he was a yellow
+pup; that he had made a mistake; and that the stuff was all off, though
+I worded it a little different from that. Slung in some fancy words and
+high-toned phrases.
+
+You see, I had made up my mind that the best of a bad matter was the
+Churchill girl, and I didn't propose to have her commit herself, too,
+until I'd sort of cleared away the wreckage. Then I reckoned on
+copper-riveting their engagement by announcing it myself and standing
+over Jack with a shotgun to see that there wasn't any more nonsense.
+They were both so light-headed and light-waisted and light-footed that
+it seemed to me that they were just naturally mates.
+
+Jack reached for those letters when they were addressed and started to
+put them in his pocket, but I had reached first. I reckon he'd decided
+that something might happen to them on their way to the post-office; but
+nothing did, for I called in the butler and made him go right out and
+mail them then and there.
+
+I'd had the letters dated from my house, and I made Jack spend the night
+there. I reckoned it might be as well to keep him within reaching
+distance for the next day or two. He showed up at breakfast in the
+morning looking like a calf on the way to the killing pens, and I could
+see that his thoughts were mighty busy following the postman who was
+delivering those letters. I tried to cheer him up by reading some little
+odds and ends from the morning paper about other people's troubles, but
+they didn't seem to interest him.
+
+"They must just about have received them," he finally groaned into his
+coffee cup. "Why did I send them! What will those girls think of me!
+They'll cut me dead--never speak to me again."
+
+The butler came in before I could tell him that this was about what we'd
+calculated on their doing, and said: "Beg pardon, sir, but there's a
+lady asking for you at the telephone."
+
+"A lady!" says Jack. "Tell her I'm not here." Talk to one of those
+girls, even from a safe distance! He guessed not. He turned as pale as
+a hog on ice at the thought of it.
+
+"I'm sorry, sir," said the man, "but I've already said that you were
+breakfasting here. She said it was very important."
+
+I could see that Jack's curiosity was already getting the best of his
+scare. After all, he threw out, feeling me, it might be best to hear
+what she had to say. I thought so, too, and he went to the instrument
+and shouted "Hello!" in what he tried to make a big, brave voice, but
+it wobbled a little all the same.
+
+I got the other end of the conversation from him when he was through.
+
+"Hello! Is that you, Jack?" chirped the Curzon girl.
+
+"Yes. Who is that?"
+
+"Edith," came back. "I have your letter, but I can't make out what it's
+all about. Come this afternoon and tell me, for we're still good
+friends, aren't we, Jack?"
+
+"Yes--certainly," stammered Jack.
+
+"And you'll come?"
+
+"Yes," he answered, and cut her off.
+
+He had hardly recovered from this shock when a messenger boy came with a
+note, addressed in a woman's writing.
+
+"Now for it," he said, and breaking the seal read:
+
+     "'_Jack dear:_ Your horrid note doesn't say anything, nor explain
+     anything. Come this afternoon and tell what it means to
+                                                         MABEL.'"
+
+"Here's a go," exclaimed Jack, but he looked pleased in a sort of
+sneaking way. "What do you think of it, Mr. Graham?"
+
+"I don't like it."
+
+"Think they intend to cut up?" he asked.
+
+"Like a sausage machine; and yet I don't see how they can stand for you
+after that letter."
+
+"Well, shall I go?"
+
+"Yes, in fact I suppose you must go; but Jack, be a man. Tell 'em plain
+and straight that you don't love 'em as you should to marry 'em; say
+you saw your old girl a few days ago and found you loved her still, or
+something from the same trough, and stick to it. Take what you deserve.
+If they hold you up to the bull-ring, the only thing you can do is to
+propose to take the whole bunch to Utah, and let 'em share and share
+alike. That'll settle it. Be firm."
+
+"As a rock, sir."
+
+I made Jack come downtown and lunch with me, but when I started him off,
+about two o'clock, he looked so like a cat padding up the back-stairs to
+where she knows there's a little canary meat--scared, but happy--that I
+said once more: "Now be firm, Jack."
+
+"Firm's the word, sir," was the resolute answer.
+
+"And unyielding."
+
+"As the old guard." And Jack puffed himself out till he was as chesty as
+a pigeon on a barn roof, and swung off down the street looking mighty
+fine and manly from the rear.
+
+I never really got the straight of it, but I pieced together these
+particulars later. At the corner there was a flower store. Jack stepped
+inside and sent a box of roses by special messenger to Miss Curzon, so
+there might be something to start conversation when he got there. Two
+blocks farther on he passed a second florist's, turned back and sent
+some lilies to Miss Moore, for fear she might think he'd forgotten her
+during the hour or more before he could work around to her house. Then
+he chased about and found a third florist, from whom he ordered some
+violets for Miss Churchill, to remind her that she had promised him the
+first dance at the Blairs' that night. Your Ma told me that Jack had
+nice instincts about these little things which women like, and always
+put a good deal of heavy thought into selecting his flowers for them.
+It's been my experience that a critter who has instincts instead of
+sense belongs in the bushes with the dicky-birds.
+
+No one ever knew just what happened to Jack during the next three hours.
+He showed up at his club about five o'clock with a mighty conceited set
+to his jaw, but it dropped as if the spring had broken when he caught
+sight of me waiting for him in the reading-room.
+
+"You here?" he asked as he threw himself into a chair.
+
+"You bet," I said. "I wanted to hear how you made out. You settled the
+whole business, I take it?" but I knew mighty well from his looks that
+he hadn't settled anything.
+
+"Not--not exactly--that is to say, entirely; but I've made a very
+satisfactory beginning."
+
+"Began it all over again, I suppose."
+
+This hit so near the truth that Jack jumped, in spite of himself, and
+then he burst out with a really swear. I couldn't have been more
+surprised if your Ma had cussed.
+
+"Damn it, sir, I won't stand any more of your confounded meddling. Those
+letters were a piece of outrageous brutality. I'm breaking off with the
+girls, but I've gone about it in a gentler and, I hope, more dignified,
+way."
+
+"Jack, I don't believe any such stuff and guff. You're tied up to them
+harder and tighter than ever."
+
+I could see I'd made a bull's eye, for Jack began to bluster, but I cut
+him short with:
+
+"Go to the devil your own way," and walked out of the club. I reckon
+that Jack felt mighty disturbed for as much as an hour, but a good
+dinner took the creases out of his system. He'd found that Miss Moore
+didn't intend to go to the Blairs', and that Miss Curzon had planned to
+go to a dance with her sister somewheres else, so he calculated on
+having a clear track for a trial spin with Miss Churchill.
+
+I surprised your Ma a good deal that evening by allowing that I'd go to
+the Blairs' myself, for it looked to me as if the finals might be
+trotted there, and I thought I'd better be around, because, while I
+didn't see much chance of getting any sense into Jack's head, I felt I
+ought to do what I could on my friendship account with his father.
+
+Jack was talking to Miss Churchill when I came into the room, and he was
+tending to business so strictly that he didn't see me bearing down on
+him from one side of the room, nor Edith Curzon's sister, Mrs. Dick, a
+mighty capable young married woman, bearing down on him from the other,
+nor Miss Curzon, with one of his roses in her hair, watching him from a
+corner. There must have been a council of war between the sisters that
+afternoon, and a change of their plans for the evening.
+
+[Illustration: "_Miss Curzon, with one of his roses in her hair,
+watching him from a corner._"]
+
+Mrs. Dick beat me stalking Jack, but I was just behind, a close second.
+He didn't see her until she got right up to him and rapped him on the arm
+with her fan.
+
+"Dear Jack," she says, all smiles and sugar; "dear Jack, I've just
+heard. Edith has told me, though I'd suspected something for a long,
+long time, you rogue," and she fetched him another kittenish clip with
+the fan.
+
+Jack looked about the way I once saw old Miss Curley, the president of
+the Good Templars back in our town in Missouri, look at a party when she
+half-swallowed a spoonful of her ice cream before she discovered that it
+was flavored with liquor.
+
+But he stammered something and hurried Miss Churchill away, though not
+before a fellow who was going by had wrung his hand and said,
+"Congratulations, old chap. Just heard the news."
+
+Jack's only idea seemed to travel, and to travel far and fast, and he
+dragged his partner along to the other end of the room, while I
+followed the band. We had almost gone the length of the course, when
+Jack, who had been staring ahead mighty hard, shied and balked, for
+there, not ten feet away, stood Miss Moore, carrying his lilies, and
+blushing and smiling at something young Blakely was saying to her.
+
+I reckon Jack guessed what that something was, but just then Blakely
+caught sight of him and rushed up to where he was standing.
+
+"I congratulate you, Jack," he said. "Miss Moore's a charming girl."
+
+And now Miss Churchill slipped her hand from his arm and turned and
+looked at Jack. Her lips were laughing, but there was something in her
+eye which made Jack turn his own away.
+
+"Oh, you lucky Jack," she laughed. "You twice lucky Jack."
+
+Jack simply curled up: "Wretched mistake somewhere," he mumbled.
+"Awfully hot here--get you a glass of water," and he rushed off. He
+dodged around Miss Moore, and made a flank movement which got him by
+Miss Curzon and safely to the door. He kept on; I followed.
+
+I had to go to New York on business next day. Jack had already gone
+there, bought a ticket for Europe, and was just loafing around the pier
+trying to hurry the steamer off. I went down to see him start, and he
+looked so miserable that I'd have felt sorry for him if I hadn't seen
+him look miserable before.
+
+"Is it generally known, sir, do you think?" he asked me humbly. "Can't
+you hush it up somehow?"
+
+"Hush it up! You might as well say 'Shoo!' to the Limited and expect it
+to stop for you."
+
+"Mr. Graham, I'm simply heartbroken over it all. I know I shall never
+reach Liverpool. I'll go mad on the voyage across, and throw myself
+overboard. I'm too delicately strung to stand a thing of this sort."
+
+"Delicate rats! You haven't nerve enough not to stand it," I said.
+"Brace up and be a man, and let this be a lesson to you. Good-by."
+
+Jack took my hand sort of mechanically and looked at me without seeing
+me, for his grief-dimmed eyes, in straying along the deck, had lit on
+that pretty little Southern baggage, Fanny Fairfax. And as I started off
+he was leaning over her in the same old way, looking into her brown eyes
+as if he saw a full-course dinner there.
+
+"Think of _your_ being on board!" I heard him say. "I'm the luckiest
+fellow alive; by Jove, I am!"
+
+I gave Jack up, and an ex-grass widow is keeping him in order now. I
+don't go much on grass widows, but I give her credit for doing a pretty
+good job. She's got Jack so tame that he eats out of her hand, and so
+well trained that he don't allow strangers to pet him.
+
+I inherited one Jack--I couldn't help that. But I don't propose to wake
+up and find another one in the family. So you write me what's what by
+return.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+
+
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |           No. 20            |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+                  |  From John Graham, at the   |
+                  |  Boston House of Graham &   |
+                  |  Co., to his son,           |
+                  |  Pierrepont, at the Union   |
+                  |  Stock Yards in Chicago.    |
+                  |  Mr. Pierrepont has told    |
+                  |  the old man "what's what"  |
+                  |  and received a limited     |
+                  |  blessing.                  |
+                  +-----------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+                              XX
+
+
+                                        BOSTON, November 11, 189-
+
+_Dear Pierrepont:_ If that's what, it's all right. And you can't get
+married too quick to suit the old man. I believe in short engagements
+and long marriages. I don't see any sense in a fellow's sitting around
+on the mourner's bench with the sinners, after he's really got religion.
+The time to size up the other side's strength is before the engagement.
+
+Some fellows propose to a girl before they know whether her front and
+her back hair match, and then holler that they're stuck when they find
+that she's got a cork leg and a glass eye as well. I haven't any
+sympathy with them. They start out on the principle that married people
+have only one meal a day, and that of fried oysters and tutti-frutti
+ice-cream after the theatre. Naturally, a girl's got her better nature
+and her best complexion along under those circumstances; but the really
+valuable thing to know is how she approaches ham and eggs at seven A.M.,
+and whether she brings her complexion with her to the breakfast table.
+And these fellows make a girl believe that they're going to spend all
+the time between eight and eleven P.M., for the rest of their lives,
+holding a hundred and forty pounds, live weight, in their lap, and
+saying that it feels like a feather. The thing to find out is whether,
+when one of them gets up to holding a ten pound baby in his arms, for
+five minutes, he's going to carry on as if it weighed a ton.
+
+A girl can usually catch a whisper to the effect that she's the showiest
+goods on the shelf, but the vital thing for a fellow to know is whether
+her ears are sharp enough to hear him when he shouts that she's spending
+too much money and that she must reduce expenses. Of course, when you're
+patting and petting and feeding a woman she's going to purr, but there's
+nothing like stirring her up a little now and then to see if she spits
+fire and heaves things when she's mad.
+
+I want to say right here that there's only one thing more aggravating in
+this world than a woman who gets noisy when she's mad, and that's one
+who gets quiet. The first breaks her spell of temper with the crockery,
+but the second simmers along like a freight engine on the track beside
+your berth--keeps you scared and ready to jump for fear she's going to
+blow off any minute; but she never does and gets it over with--just
+drizzles it out.
+
+You can punch your brother when he plays the martyr, but you've got to
+love your wife. A violent woman drives a fellow to drink, but a nagging
+one drives him crazy. She takes his faults and ties them to him like a
+tin can to a yellow dog's tail, and the harder he runs to get away from
+them the more he hears of them.
+
+I simply mention these things in a general way, and in the spirit of the
+preacher at the funeral of the man who wasn't "a professor"--because
+it's customary to make a few appropriate remarks on these occasions.
+From what I saw of Helen Heath, I reckon she's not getting any the best
+of it. She's what I call a mighty eligible young woman--pretty, bright,
+sensible, and without any fortune to make her foolish and you a fool. In
+fact, you'd have to sit up nights to make yourself good enough for her,
+even if you brought her a million, instead of fifty a week.
+
+I'm a great believer in women in the home, but I don't take much stock
+in them in the office, though I reckon I'm prejudiced and they've come
+to stay. I never do business with a woman that I don't think of a little
+incident which happened when I was first married to your Ma. We set up
+housekeeping in one of those cottages that you read about in the story
+books, but that you want to shy away from, when it's put up to you to
+live in one of them. There were nice climbing roses on the front porch,
+but no running water in the kitchen; there were a-plenty of old fashioned
+posies in the front yard, and a-plenty of rats in the cellar; there was
+half an acre of ground out back, but so little room inside that I had to
+sit with my feet out a window. It was just the place to go for a picnic,
+but it's been my experience that a fellow does most of his picnicking
+before he's married.
+
+Your Ma did the cooking, and I hustled for things to cook, though I
+would take a shy at it myself once in a while and get up my muscle
+tossing flapjacks. It was pretty rough sailing, you bet, but one way and
+another we managed to get a good deal of satisfaction out of it, because
+we had made up our minds to take our fun as we went along. With most
+people happiness is something that is always just a day off. But I have
+made it a rule never to put off being happy till to-morrow. Don't accept
+notes for happiness, because you'll find that when they're due they're
+never paid, but just renewed for another thirty days.
+
+I was clerking in a general store at that time, but I had a little
+weakness for livestock, even then; and while I couldn't afford to plunge
+in it exactly, I managed to buy a likely little shoat that I reckoned on
+carrying through the Summer on credit and presenting with a bill for
+board in the Fall. He was just a plain pig when he came to us, and we
+kept him in a little sty, but we weren't long in finding out that he
+wasn't any ordinary root-and-grunt pig. The first I knew your Ma was
+calling him Toby, and had turned him loose. Answered to his name like a
+dog. Never saw such a sociable pig. Wanted to sit on the porch with us.
+Tried to come into the house evenings. Used to run down the road
+squealing for joy when he saw me coming home from work.
+
+Well, it got on towards November and Toby had been making the most of
+his opportunities. I never saw a pig that turned corn into fat so fast,
+and the stouter he got the better his disposition grew. I reckon I was
+attached to him myself, in a sort of a sneaking way, but I was mighty
+fond of hog meat, too, and we needed Toby in the kitchen. So I sent
+around and had him butchered.
+
+When I got home to dinner next day, I noticed that your Ma looked mighty
+solemn as she set the roast of pork down in front of me, but I strayed
+off, thinking of something else, as I carved, and my wits were off wool
+gathering sure enough when I said:
+
+"Will you have a piece of Toby, my dear?"
+
+Well sir, she just looked at me for a moment, and then she burst out
+crying and ran away from the table. But when I went after her and asked
+her what was the matter, she stopped crying and was mad in a minute all
+the way through. Called me a heartless, cruel cannibal. That seemed to
+relieve her so that she got over her mad and began to cry again. Begged
+me to take Toby out of pickle and to bury him in the garden. I reasoned
+with her, and in the end I made her see that any obsequies for Toby,
+with pork at eight cents a pound, would be a pretty expensive funeral
+for us. But first and last she had managed to take my appetite away so
+that I didn't want any roast pork for dinner or cold pork for supper.
+That night I took what was left of Toby to a store keeper at the
+Crossing, who I knew would be able to gaze on his hams without bursting
+into tears, and got a pretty fair price for him.
+
+I simply mention Toby in passing, as an example of why I believe women
+weren't cut out for business--at least for the pork-packing business.
+I've had dealings with a good many of them, first and last, and it's
+been my experience that when they've got a weak case they add their sex
+to it and win, and that when they've got a strong case they subtract
+their sex from it and deal with you harder than a man. They're simply
+bound to win either way, and I don't like to play a game where I haven't
+any show. When a clerk makes a fool break, I don't want to beg his
+pardon for calling his attention to it, and I don't want him to blush
+and tremble and leak a little brine into a fancy pocket handkerchief.
+
+A little change is a mighty soothing thing, and I like a woman's ways
+too much at home to care very much for them at the office. Instead of
+hiring women, I try to hire their husbands, and then I usually have them
+both working for me. There's nothing like a woman at home to spur on a
+man at the office.
+
+A married man is worth more salary than a single one, because his wife
+makes him worth more. He's apt to go to bed a little sooner and to get
+up a little earlier; to go a little steadier and to work a little harder
+than the fellow who's got to amuse a different girl every night, and
+can't stay at home to do it. That's why I'm going to raise your salary
+to seventy-five dollars a week the day you marry Helen, and that's why
+I'm going to quit writing these letters--I'm simply going to turn you
+over to her and let her keep you in order. I bet she'll do a better job
+than I have.
+
+                                     Your affectionate father,
+                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.
+
+
+                    THE END
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+        NOTABLE BOOKS OF AMERICAN HUMOR
+
+                FROM THE LIST OF
+
+        SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, BOSTON
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+      BY FINLAY PETER DUNNE ("MR. DOOLEY")
+
+"Mr. Dooley must be added to the acquaintance of all who esteem good
+sense and good humor. He is worthy to take his place as a national
+satirist beside Hosea Biglow."--_The Academy_, London.
+
+               *       *       *
+
+=MR. DOOLEY: IN PEACE AND IN WAR (70th thousand)=
+
+"We awoke in the morning to kneel at the shrine of Dooley, and to
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+_The London Daily Mail_.
+
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+among those humorists who have really made a genuine contribution to
+permanent literature."--HARRY THURSTON PECK, in _The Bookman_.
+
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+slave-driver's whip."--_Pall Mall Gazette_.
+
+Green cloth, decorative, 7 x 4-1/2 in.                    =$1.25=
+
+               *       *       *
+
+=MR. DOOLEY: IN THE HEARTS OF HIS COUNTRYMEN (35th thousand)=
+
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+profound indeed, and its victim would be an altogether hopeless
+case."--_The London World._
+
+"His new book shows no falling off: his wit is as nimble as ever, his
+eye as quick to note incongruities, his satire as well directed and as
+brilliant."--_The Academy_, London.
+
+"'Mr. Dooley' improves on acquaintance. His creator is a real and rare
+humorist."--_The Bookman._
+
+Blue cloth, decorative, 7 x 4-1/2 in.                     =$1.25=
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+               BY GELETT BURGESS.
+
+=VIVETTE. Or, the Memoirs of the Romance Association.=
+
+Setting forth the diverting Adventures of one Richard Redforth in the
+very pleasant City of Millamours; how he took Service in the
+Association; how he met and wooed the gay Vivette; how they sped their
+Honeymoon and played the Town; how they spread a mad Banquet; of them
+that came thereto, and the Tales they told; of the Exploits of the
+principal Characters, and especially of the Disappearance of Vivette.
+
+"Mr. Burgess displays infinite zest and exhaustless resources of
+invention, and hurries his readers breathlessly along, from one
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+down at finis with a chuckle of appreciative laughter."--_The Literary
+News._
+
+Cloth, 6-3/4 x 4-1/8 in.                                  =$1.25=
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+                BY S. E. KISER.
+
+=GEORGIE.=
+
+The Sayings and Doings of his Paw, his Maw, Little Albert, and the Bull
+Pup.
+
+"The charm of the book is the permanent charm of all literature,
+according to Matthew Arnold's admirable definition. _Georgie_ is a
+singularly acute and humorous interpretation of the home life led by the
+American who is neither too rich to be aping the English nor too poor to
+avoid the other extreme of Europeanism in slum or hovel. The book is
+worth reading as holding 'a mirror up to nature,' and it is also worth
+praising because it discloses between its lines a kindly and unspoiled
+nature on the part of the author."--_Chicago Tribune._
+
+Cloth, decorative, 6-3/8 x 5-7/8 in. With ten illustrations by Ralph
+Bergengren.                                               =$1.00=
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+                BY HOLMAN F. DAY
+
+=UP IN MAINE. Stories of Yankee Life told in Verse.=
+
+Few books of verse have won popular favor so quickly as this volume,
+which is now in its ninth edition and selling as steadily as when first
+published. It is a rare combination of wit, humor, sense, and homely
+pathos.
+
+"Reading the book, one feels as though he had Maine in the
+phonograph."--_The New York Sun._
+
+"James Russell Lowell would have welcomed this delicious adjunct to _The
+Biglow Papers._"--_The Outlook._
+
+"So fresh, so vigorous, and so full of manly feeling that they sweep
+away all criticism."--_The Nation._
+
+"His subjects are rough diamonds. They have the inherent qualities from
+which great characters are developed, and out of which heroes are
+made."--_Buffalo Commercial._
+
+Cloth, decorative, six illustrations, 7-1/2 x 4-7/8 in.   =$1.00=
+
+               *       *       *
+
+=PINE TREE BALLADS. Rhymed Stories of Unplaned Human Natur' up in Maine.=
+
+Mr. Day's second book bids fair to outdo in popularity his earlier
+volume.
+
+The section titles, "Our Home Folks," "Songs of the Sea and Shore,"
+"Ballads of Drive and Camp," "Just Human Nature," "Next to the Heart,"
+"Our Good Prevaricators," and "Ballads of Capers and Actions," give an
+idea of the nature of the contents, which are fully equal in freshness,
+vigour, and manly feeling to the poems by which Mr. Day has already won
+an established reputation.
+
+"It is impossible to think of any person or class of people in America
+that these epical lyrics, these laughter-fetching, tear-provoking
+ballads will fail to please."--_The Chicago Record-Herald._
+
+Cloth, decorative, gilt top, illustrated, 7-1/2 x 4 in. _Net_, =$1.00=
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+               BY OLIVER HERFORD
+
+=ALPHABET OF CELEBRITIES, AN=
+
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+funny as he can, and the wicked glee with which he groups persons
+incongruous and antipathetic and shows them doing things impossible to
+them, and makes pictures of them, is a thing to shock the Gradgrinds and
+dismay the Chadbands. The book is printed in two colors to divert the
+reader's mind from the jokes, lest laughter be fatal to him."--_New York
+Times._
+
+Paper boards, 9-3/8 x 7-1/8 in.
+With 26 illustrations by the Author.                      =$1.50=
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+                BY JOHN B. TABB
+
+=CHILD VERSE. Poems Grave and Gay=
+
+Little poems, full of fancy and sweetness, for grown people as well as
+for children.
+
+"It is pleasant to observe that Father Tabb is not afraid of the pun. He
+uses it very felicitously in a number of his verses. It is good to see
+the rehabilitation of an ancient and unfortunate friend."--_Harper's
+Weekly._
+
+Cloth, decorative, 7-7/8 x 6-3/8 in.                      =$1.00=
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+                  BY AGNES LEE
+
+=ROUND RABBIT, THE. And Other Child Verse=
+
+A new holiday edition of Mrs. Lee's delightful verse, which includes a
+number of new poems. With illustrations by O'Neill Latham.
+
+"The mother who (can read) to her young ones these cheerful, sweet, and
+fascinating jingles, with the pretty quaint conceits and ingenious
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+dyed in cerulean."--_The Bookseller, Newsdealer, and Stationer._
+
+Cloth, decorative, 7-7/8 x 6-1/4 in.                 Net, =$1.00=
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+        A STANDARD LIBRARY OF BIOGRAPHY
+
+               *       *       *
+
+_THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES OF EMINENT AMERICANS_
+
+               *       *       *
+
+The aim of this series is to furnish brief, readable, and authentic
+accounts of the lives of those Americans whose personalities have
+impressed themselves most deeply on the character and history of their
+country. On account of the length of the more formal lives, often
+running into large volumes, the average busy man and woman have not the
+time or hardly the inclination to acquaint themselves with American
+biography. In the present series everything that such a reader would
+ordinarily care to know is given by writers of special competence, who
+possess in full measure the best contemporary point of view. Each volume
+is equipped with a photogravure portrait, an engraved title-page, a
+calendar of important dates, and a brief bibliography for further
+reading. Finally, the volumes are printed in a form convenient for
+reading and for carrying handily in the pocket.
+
+"They contain exactly what every intelligent American ought to know
+about the lives of our great men."--_Boston Herald._
+
+"Surprisingly complete studies, ... admirably planned and
+executed."--_Christian Register._
+
+"Prepared as carefully as if they were so many imperial quartos, instead
+of being so small that they may be carried in the pocket."--_New York
+Times._
+
+"They are books of marked excellence."--_Chicago Inter-Ocean._
+
+"They interest vividly, and their instruction is surprisingly
+comprehensive."--_The Outlook._
+
+Price per volume, cloth, =75c=. _net._   Lambskin, =$1.00= _net._
+
+
+
+
+  +-------------------------------------------------------------+
+  |     ---------------------------------------------------     |
+  |                  THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES                     |
+  |                  OF EMINENT AMERICANS.                      |
+  |     ---------------------------------------------------     |
+  | The following volumes are issued:--                         |
+  |                                                             |
+  | =Louis Agassiz=, by ALICE BACHE GOULD.                      |
+  | =John James Audubon=, by JOHN BURROUGHS.                    |
+  | =Edwin Booth=, by CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND.                |
+  | =Phillips Brooks=, by M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE.                   |
+  | =John Brown=, by JOSEPH EDGAR CHAMBERLIN.                   |
+  | =Aaron Burr=, by HENRY CHILDS MERWIN.                       |
+  | =James Fenimore Cooper=, by W. B. SHUBRICK CLYMER.          |
+  | =Stephen Decatur=, by CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY.                 |
+  | =Frederick Douglass=, by CHARLES W. CHESNUTT.               |
+  | =Ralph Waldo Emerson=, by FRANK B. SANBORN.                 |
+  | =David G. Farragut=, by JAMES BARNES.                       |
+  | =Ulysses S. Grant=, by OWEN WISTER.                         |
+  | =Alexander Hamilton=, by JAMES SCHOULER.                    |
+  | =Nathaniel Hawthorne=, by MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS.             |
+  | =Father Hecker=, by HENRY D. SEDGWICK, Jr.                  |
+  | =Sam Houston=, by SARAH BARNWELL ELLIOTT.                   |
+  | ="Stonewall" Jackson=, by CARL HOVEY.                       |
+  | =Thomas Jefferson=, by THOMAS E. WATSON.                    |
+  | =Robert E. Lee=, by WILLIAM P. TRENT.                       |
+  | =Henry W. Longfellow=, by GEORGE RICE CARPENTER.            |
+  | =James Russell Lowell=, by EDWARD EVERETT HALE, Jr.         |
+  | =Samuel F. B. Morse=, by JOHN TROWERIDGE.                   |
+  | =Thomas Paine=, by ELLERY SEDGWICK.                         |
+  | =Daniel Webster=, by NORMAN HAPGOOD.                        |
+  | =John Greenleaf Whittier=, by RICHARD BURTON.               |
+  |                                                             |
+  | Price per volume, cloth, 75c. _net_; leather, $1.00 _net._  |
+  |                                                             |
+  | SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers.                       |
+  +-------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+  +-------------------------------------------------------------+
+  |    _A Companion Series to the Beacon Biographies_           |
+  |     ---------------------------------------------------     |
+  |             THE WESTMINSTER BIOGRAPHIES                     |
+  |               _of Eminent Englishmen_                       |
+  |     ---------------------------------------------------     |
+  | The WESTMINSTER BIOGRAPHIES are uniform in plan,            |
+  | size, and general make-up with the BEACON BIOGRAPHIES,      |
+  | the point of important difference lying in the fact that    |
+  | they deal with the lives of eminent Englishmen instead      |
+  | of eminent Americans. They are bound in limp red cloth,     |
+  | are gilt-topped, and have a cover design and a vignette     |
+  | title-page by BERTRAM GROSVENOR GOODHUE. Like the _Beacon   |
+  | Biographies_, each volume has a frontispiece portrait, a    |
+  | photogravure, a calendar of dates, and a bibliography for   |
+  | further reading.                                            |
+  |                                                             |
+  | The following volumes are issued:--                         |
+  |                                                             |
+  | =Robert Browning=, by ARTHUR WAUGH.                         |
+  | =Daniel Defoe=, by WILFRED WHITTEN.                         |
+  | =Adam Duncan= (Lord Camperdown), by H. W. WILSON.           |
+  | =George Eliot=, by CLARA THOMSON.                           |
+  | =Cardinal Newman=, by A. R. WALLER.                         |
+  | =John Wesley=, by FRANK BANFIELD.                           |
+  |                                                             |
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+  | SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers.                       |
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