[Illustration: "_Young fellows come to me looking for jobs and tellingme 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 knownon 'Change as "Old Gorgon Graham, " tohis Son, Pierrepont, facetiously knownto his intimates as "Piggy. "

Boston: Small, Maynard & Company: 1903

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 _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. _

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 TO CYRUS CURTIS A SELF-MADE MAN

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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

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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

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 +------------------------------+ | 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 meto be sure to tell you not to over-study, and I want to tell you to besure not to under-study. What we're really sending you to Harvard for isto get a little of the education that's so good and plenty there. Whenit's passed around you don't want to be bashful, but reach right out andtake a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You'llfind that education's about the only thing lying around loose in thisworld, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much ofas he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight andthe 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 topry a few dollars loose from the odd millions that are lying around; andsome learn it by having fifty thousand or so left to them and startingout to spend it as if it were fifty thousand a year. Some men learn thevalue of truth by having to do business with liars; and some by going toSunday School. Some men learn the cussedness of whiskey by having adrunken father; and some by having a good mother. Some men get aneducation from other men and newspapers and public libraries; and someget it from professors and parchments--it doesn't make any specialdifference how you get a half-nelson on the right thing, just so you getit and freeze on to it. The package doesn't count after the eye's beenattracted by it, and in the end it finds its way to the ash heap. It'sthe quality of the goods inside which tells, when they once get into thekitchen and up to the cook. 

You can cure a ham in dry salt and you can cure it in sweet pickle, andwhen you're through you've got pretty good eating either way, providedyou started in with a sound ham. If you didn't, it doesn't make anyspecial difference how you cured it--the ham-tryer's going to strike thesour spot around the bone. And it doesn't make any difference how muchsugar and fancy pickle you soak into a fellow, he's no good unless he'ssound and sweet at the core. 

The first thing that any education ought to give a man is character, andthe second thing is education. That is where I'm a little skittish aboutthis college business. I'm not starting in to preach to you, because Iknow a young fellow with the right sort of stuff in him preaches tohimself harder than any one else can, and that he's mighty oftenswitched off the right path by having it pointed out to him in the wrongway. 

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 inSunday School if I didn't want to be saved, and then laying for me afterthe service and praying with me. Of course I wanted to be saved, but Ididn'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'sgot a good conscience he don't need to have right and wrong labeled forhim. Now that your Ma's left and the apron strings are cut, you'renaturally running up against a new sensation every minute, but if you'llsimply use a little conscience as a tryer, and probe into a thing whichlooks sweet and sound on the skin, to see if you can't fetch up a soursmell from around the bone, you'll be all right. 

[Illustration: "_Old Doc Hoover asked me right out in Sunday School if Ididn't want to be saved. _"]

I'm anxious that you should be a good scholar, but I'm more anxious thatyou should be a good clean man. And if you graduate with a soundconscience, I shan't care so much if there are a few holes in yourLatin. There are two parts of a college education--the part that you getin the schoolroom from the professors, and the part that you get outsideof it from the boys. That's the really important part. For the firstcan 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 whichparticular thing did him good, but he can usually tell which one did himharm. After a square meal of roast beef and vegetables, and mince pieand 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 thedemand for painkiller in your insides, or to guess, next morning, whichone made you believe in a personal devil the night before. And so, whilea fellow can't figure out to an ounce whether it's Latin or algebra orhistory or what among the solids that is building him up in this placeor that, he can go right along feeding them in and betting that they'renot the things that turn his tongue fuzzy. It's down among the sweets, among his amusements and recreations, that he's going to find hisstomach-ache, and it's there that he wants to go slow and to pick andchoose. 

It's not the first half, but the second half of a college educationwhich merchants mean when they ask if a college education pays. It's theWillie 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-rumand 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 boysthat make 'em doubt the cash value of the college output, and overlookthe roast-beef and blood-gravy boys, the shirt-sleeves andhigh-water-pants boys, who take their college education and make somefellow's business hum with it. 

Does a College education pay? Does it pay to feed in pork trimmings atfive cents a pound at the hopper and draw out nice, cunning, little"country" sausages at twenty cents a pound at the other end? Does itpay to take a steer that's been running loose on the range and livingon cactus and petrified wood till he's just a bunch of barb-wire andsole-leather, and feed him corn till he's just a solid hunk ofporterhouse steak and oleo oil?

You bet it pays. Anything that trains a boy to think and to think quickpays; anything that teaches a boy to get the answer before the otherfellow gets through biting the pencil, pays. 

College doesn't make fools; it develops them. It doesn't makebright men; it develops them. A fool will turn out a fool, whetherhe goes to college or not, though he'll probably turn out adifferent sort of a fool. And a good, strong boy will turn out abright, strong man whether he's worn smooth in thegrab-what-you-want-and-eat-standing-with-one-eye-skinned-for-the-dogschool of the streets and stores, or polished up and slicked down in thegive-your-order-to-the-waiter-and-get-a-sixteen-course-dinner school ofthe 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 niggerfighting, and this grin-and-look-pleasant, dodge-and-save-your-wind-till-you-see-a-chance-to-land-on-the-solar-plexusstyle of the trained athlete. Both styles win fights, but the fellowwith a little science is the better man, providing he's kept his musclehard. If he hasn't, he's in a bad way, for his fancy sparring is justgoing 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 moreamusing little cusses they become, and the funnier capers they cut whenthey show off their tricks. Naturally, the place to send a boy of thatbreed is to the circus, not to college. 

Speaking of educated pigs, naturally calls to mind the case of old manWhitaker and his son, Stanley. I used to know the old man mighty wellten years ago. He was one of those men whom business narrows, insteadof broadens. Didn't get any special fun out of his work, but kept rightalong at it because he didn't know anything else. Told me he'd had toroot for a living all his life and that he proposed to have Stan'sbrought to him in a pail. Sent him to private schools and dancingschools and colleges and universities, and then shipped him to Oxfordto soak in a little "atmosphere, " as he put it. I never could quite layhold of that atmosphere dodge by the tail, but so far as I could makeout, the idea was that there was something in the air of the Oxfordham-house that gave a fellow an extra fancy smoke. 

Well, about the time Stan was through, the undertaker called by for theold 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 hedidn't strike me as having the making of a good private of industry, letalone a captain, so I started in to get him a job that would suit histalents. Got him in a bank, but while he knew more about the history ofbanking than the president, and more about political economy than theboard of directors, he couldn't learn the difference between a fiverthat the Government turned out and one that was run off on a hand pressin a Halsted Street basement. Got him a job on a paper, but while heknew 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 ofOld Nick, he couldn't write up a satisfactory account of the Ice-Men'sBall. Could prove that two and two made four by trigonometry andgeometry, but couldn't learn to keep books; was thick as thieves withall the high-toned poets, but couldn't write a good, snappy, merchantable street-car ad. ; knew a thousand diseases that would take aman off before he could blink, but couldn't sell a thousand-dollartontine policy; knew the lives of our Presidents as well as if he'd beenraised with them, but couldn't place a set of the Library of the Fathersof the Republic, though they were offered on little easy payments thatmade them come as easy as borrowing them from a friend. Finally I hit onwhat seemed to be just the right thing. I figured out that any fellowwho had such a heavy stock of information on hand, ought to be able tojob it out to good advantage, and so I got him a place teaching. But itseemed 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 allwrong, and that made him sore; and he knew so much about the deadlanguages, which was what he was hired to teach, that he forgot he washandling live boys, and as he couldn't tell it all to them in theregular time, he kept them after hours, and that made them sore and putStan out of a job again. The last I heard of him he was writing articleson Why Young Men Fail, and making a success of it, because failing wasthe one subject on which he was practical. 

I simply mention Stan in passing as an example of the fact that it isn'tso much knowing a whole lot, as knowing a little and how to use it thatcounts. 

 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 accountfor the month, and it fairly makes a fellow hump-shouldered to look itover. When I told you that I wished you to get a liberal education, Ididn't mean that I wanted to buy Cambridge. Of course the bills won'tbreak me, but they will break you unless you are very, very careful. 

I have noticed for the last two years that your accounts have beengrowing heavier every month, but I haven't seen any signs of your takinghonors to justify the increased operating expenses; and that is badbusiness--a good deal like feeding his weight in corn to a scalawagsteer that won't fat up. 

I haven't said anything about this before, as I trusted a good deal toyour native common-sense to keep you from making a fool of yourself inthe way that some of these young fellows who haven't had to work for itdo. But because I have sat tight, I don't want you to get it into yourhead that the old man's rich, and that he can stand it, because he won'tstand it after you leave college. The sooner you adjust your spending towhat your earning capacity will be, the easier they will find it to livetogether. 

The only sure way that a man can get rich quick is to have it given tohim 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 importantposition with the firm; and, of course, there is just one place fromwhich a man can start for that position with Graham & Co. It doesn'tmake any difference whether he is the son of the old man or of thecellar boss--that place is the bottom. And the bottom in the office endof this business is a seat at the mailing-desk, with eight dollars everySaturday 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 agood education, you should be able to climb quicker than the fellow whohasn't got it; but there's going to be a time when you begin at thefactory when you won't be able to lick stamps so fast as the other boysat the desk. Yet the man who hasn't licked stamps isn't fit to writeletters. Naturally, that is the time when knowing whether the pie comesbefore the ice-cream, and how to run an automobile isn't going to be ofany real use to you. 

I simply mention these things because I am afraid your ideas as to thebasis on which you are coming with the house have swelled up a little inthe East. I can give you a start, but after that you will have todynamite your way to the front by yourself. It is all with the man. Ifyou gave some fellows a talent wrapped in a napkin to start with inbusiness, they would swap the talent for a gold brick and lose thenapkin; and there are others that you could start out with just anapkin, who would set up with it in the dry-goods business in a smallway, and then coax the other fellow's talent into it. 

I have pride enough to believe that you have the right sort of stuff inyou, but I want to see some of it come out. You will never make a goodmerchant of yourself by reversing the order in which the Lord decreedthat we should proceed--learning the spending before the earning end ofbusiness. Pay day is always a month off for the spend-thrift, and he isnever able to realize more than sixty cents on any dollar that comes tohim. But a dollar is worth one hundred and six cents to a good businessman, and he never spends the dollar. It's the man who keeps saving upand expenses down that buys an interest in the concern. That is whereyou are going to find yourself weak if your expense accounts don't lie;and they generally don't lie in that particular way, though BaronMunchausen was the first traveling man, and my drummers' bills stillshow his influence. 

I know that when a lot of young men get off by themselves, some of themthink that recklessness with money brands them as good fellows, and thatcarefulness is meanness. That is the one end of a college educationwhich is pure cussedness; and that is the one thing which makes ninebusiness men out of ten hesitate to send their boys off to school. Buton the other hand, that is the spot where a young man has the chance toshow that he is not a light-weight. I know that a good many people say Iam a pretty close proposition; that I make every hog which goes throughmy 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 outof an animal which began life with two; but you have lived with me longenough 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 whois generous with money that he has not had to sweat for, and that theboy who is a good fellow at some one else's expense would not work upinto first-class fertilizer. That same ambition to be known as a goodfellow has crowded my office with second-rate clerks, and they alwayswill be second-rate clerks. If you have it, hold it down until you haveworked for a year. Then, if your ambition runs to hunching up all weekover a desk, to earn eight dollars to blow on a few rounds of drinks forthe 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'tbring back a great deal except a few trunks of badly fittingclothes. _"]

You know how I began--I was started off with a kick, but that proved akick 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 Iknew just how many pennies there were in each of those dollars, and howhard the floor was. That is what you have got to learn. 

I remember when I was on the Lakes, our schooner was passing out throughthe draw at Buffalo when I saw little Bill Riggs, the butcher, standingup above me on the end of the bridge with a big roast of beef in hisbasket. They were a little short in the galley on that trip, so I calledup to Bill and he threw the roast down to me. I asked him how much, andhe yelled back, "about a dollar. " That was mighty good beef, and when westruck Buffalo again on the return trip, I thought I would like a littlemore of it. So I went up to Bill's shop and asked him for a piece of thesame. But this time he gave me a little roast, not near so big as theother, and it was pretty tough and stringy. But when I asked him howmuch, he answered "about a dollar. " He simply didn't have any sense ofvalues, and that's the business man's sixth sense. Bill has always beena 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 rightnow in my office, but they will never climb over the railing thatseparates the clerks from the executives. Yet if they would put in halfthe time thinking for the house that they give up to hatching outreasons 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 Iwouldn't want to; for they could double their salaries and my profits ina year. But I always lay it down as a safe proposition that the fellowwho has to break open the baby's bank toward the last of the week forcar-fare isn't going to be any Russell Sage when it comes to tradingwith the old man's money. He'd punch my bank account as full of holes asa carload of wild Texans would a fool stockman that they'd got in acorner. 

Now I know you'll say that I don't understand how it is; that you've gotto do as the other fellows do; and that things have changed since I wasa boy. There's nothing in it. Adam invented all the different ways inwhich a young man can make a fool of himself, and the college yell atthe end of them is just a frill that doesn't change essentials. The boywho does anything just because the other fellows do it is apt to scratcha poor man's back all his life. He's the chap that's buying wheat atninety-seven cents the day before the market breaks. They call him "thecountry" in the market reports, but the city's full of him. It's thefellow who has the spunk to think and act for himself, and sells shortwhen prices hit the high C and the house is standing on its hind legsyelling for more, that sits in the directors' meetings when he gets ontoward forty. 

We've got an old steer out at the packing-house that stands around atthe foot of the runway leading up to the killing pens, looking for allthe world like one of the village fathers sitting on the cracker boxbefore the grocery--sort of sad-eyed, dreamy old cuss--always has two orthree straws from his cud sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Younever saw a steer that looked as if he took less interest in things. Butby and by the boys drive a bunch of steers toward him, or cows maybe, ifwe're canning, and then you'll see Old Abe move off up that runway, sortof beckoning the bunch after him with that wicked old stump of a tail ofhis, 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. Thosesteers just naturally follow along on up that runway and into thekilling pens. But just as they get to the top, Old Abe, someways, getslost in the crowd, and he isn't among those present when the gates areclosed and the real trouble begins for his new friends. 

I never saw a dozen boys together that there wasn't an Old Abe amongthem. If you find your crowd following him, keep away from it. Thereare times when it's safest to be lonesome. Use a little common-sense, caution and conscience. You can stock a store with those threecommodities, when you get enough of them. But you've got to begingetting them young. They ain't catching after you toughen up a bit. 

You needn't write me if you feel yourself getting them. The symptomswill show in your expense account. Good-by; life's too short to writeletters 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 yourpost-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 thatcalling is in the packing-house. Some men learn all they know frombooks; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are alltheory; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enoughabout practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the worlda 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 inour street-car ads. , and about the only time our products are givenLatin names is when the State Board of Health condemns them. So I thinkyou'll find it safe to go short a little on the frills of education; ifyou want them bad enough you'll find a way to pick them up later, afterbusiness hours. 

The main thing is to get a start along right lines, and that is what Isent you to college for. I didn't expect you to carry off all theeducation 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 haveclean, straight physical ones. Because I was run through a threshingmachine when I was a boy, and didn't begin to get the straw out of myhair till I was past thirty, I haven't any sympathy with a lot of theseold fellows who go around bragging of their ignorance and saying thatboys 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 ignoranttogether. 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 toknow fractions to figure out our profits. Now a merchant needs astronomyto see them, and when he locates them they are out somewhere near thefifth decimal place. There are sixteen ounces to the pound still, buttwo of them are wrapping paper in a good many stores. And there're justas many chances for a fellow as ever, but they're a little gun shy, andyou can't catch them by any such coarse method as putting salt on theirtails. 

Thirty years ago, you could take an old muzzle-loader and knock overplenty 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 andtake a hammerless along. And when I started in the packing business itwas all straight sailing--no frills--just turning hogs into hogmeat--dry salt for the niggers down South and sugar-cured for the whitefolks up North. Everything else was sausage, or thrown away. But when weget through with a hog nowadays, he's scattered through a hundreddifferent cans and packages, and he's all accounted for. What we used tothrow away is our profit. It takes doctors, lawyers, engineers, poets, and I don't know what, to run the business, and I reckon thatimprovements 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 lotof men like these must be as clean and sharp as a hound's tooth, or someother fellow's simply going to eat him up. 

The first college man I ever hired was old John Durham's son, Jim. Thatwas 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 universeand corner wheat. And the boy took all the fancy courses and trimmingsat college. The old man was mighty proud of Jim. Wanted him to be aliterary fellow. But old Durham found out what every one learns who getshis ambitions mixed up with number two red--that there's a heap of itlying around loose in the country. The bears did quick work and kept thecash wheat coming in so lively that one settling day half a dozen of ushad 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 longto decide that the Lord would attend to keeping up the visible supply ofpoetry, and that he had better turn his attention to the stocks of messpork. Next morning he was laying for me with a letter of introductionwhen I got to the office, and when he found that I wouldn't have aprivate secretary at any price, he applied for every other position onthe premises right down to office boy. I told him I was sorry, but Icouldn't do anything for him then; that we were letting men go, but I'dkeep him in mind, and so on. The fact was that I didn't think a fellowwith Jim's training would be much good, anyhow. But Jim hung on--saidhe'd taken a fancy to the house, and wanted to work for it. Used to callby 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 stoppedhim one day as he was passing me on the street. I thought I'd find outif he really was so red-hot to work as he pretended to be; besides, Ifelt that perhaps I hadn't treated the boy just right, as I haddelivered 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 oneof those husky, lazy-moving six-footers--"I don't see any chance in theoffice, but I understand they can use another good, strong man in one ofthe loading gangs. "

I thought that would settle Jim and let me out, for it's no joke luggingbeef, 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 surerthan ever that he was not cut out for a butcher. But I told him, and offhe started hot-foot to find the foreman. I sent word by another route tosee that he got plenty to do. 

I forgot all about Jim until about three months later, when his name washanded up to me for a new place and a raise in pay. It seemed that hehad sort of abolished his job. After he had been rolling barrels awhile, and the sport had ground down one of his shoulders a couple ofinches lower than the other, he got to scheming around for a way to makethe work easier, and he hit on an idea for a sort of overhead railroadsystem, by which the barrels could be swung out of the storerooms andrun right along into the cars, and two or three men do the work of agang. It was just as I thought. Jim was lazy, but he had put the housein the way of saving so much money that I couldn't fire him. So I raisedhis salary, and made him an assistant timekeeper and checker. Jim keptat this for three or four months, until his feet began to hurt him, Iguess, and then he was out of a job again. It seems he had heardsomething of a new machine for registering the men, that did away withmost of the timekeepers except the fellows who watched the machines, andhe kept after the Superintendent until he got him to put them in. Ofcourse he claimed a raise again for effecting such a saving, and we justhad to allow it. 

I was beginning to take an interest in Jim, so I brought him up into theoffice and set him to copying circular letters. We used to send out araft of them to the trade. That was just before the general adoption oftypewriters, when they were still in the experimental stage. But Jimhadn't been in the office plugging away at the letters for a monthbefore he had the writer's cramp, and began nosing around again. Thefirst thing I knew he was sicking the agents for the new typewritingmachine on to me, and he kept them pounding away until they had made megive them a trial. Then it was all up with Mister Jim's job again. Iraised his salary without his asking for it this time, and put him outon the road to introduce a new product that we were making--beefextract. 

Jim made two trips without selling enough to keep them working overtimeat the factory, and then he came into my office with a long story abouthow we were doing it all wrong. Said we ought to go for the consumer byadvertising, 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 ofadvertising was a pretty new thing then, and I was one of the old-timerswho didn't take any stock in it. But Jim just kept plugging away at mebetween trips, until finally I took him off the road and told him to goahead and try it in a small way. 

Jim pretty nearly scared me to death that first year. At last he had gotinto something that he took an interest in--spending money--and he justfairly wallowed in it. Used to lay awake nights, thinking up new ways ofgetting rid of the old man's profits. And he found them. Seemed as if Icouldn'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 everytime I started to draw in my horns Jim talked to me, and showed me wherethere was a fortune waiting for me just around the corner. 

[Illustration: "_I put Jim Durham out on the road to introduce a newproduct. _"]

Graham's Extract started out by being something that you could makebeef-tea out of--that was all. But before Jim had been fooling with it amonth he had got his girl to think up a hundred different ways in whichit could be used, and had advertised them all. It seemed there wasnothing you could cook that didn't need a dash of it. He kept me betweena 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 showingsixteen cows standing between something that looked like a letter-press, and telling how every pound or so of Graham's Extract contained thejuice squeezed from a herd of steers. If an explorer started for theNorth Pole, Jim would send him a case of Extract, and then advertisethat it was the great heat-maker for cold climates; and if some otherfellow started across Africa he sent _him_ a case, too, and advertisedwhat 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 itcost 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 theorders for Extract began to look up, and he got a reprieve; then hebegan to make expenses, and he got a pardon; and finally a rush camethat left him high and dry in a permanent place. Jim was all right inhis way, but it was a new way, and I hadn't been broad-gauged enough tosee that it was a better way. 

That was where I caught the connection between a college education andbusiness. I've always made it a rule to buy brains, and I've learned nowthat the better trained they are the faster they find reasons forgetting their salaries raised. The fellow who hasn't had the trainingmay be just as smart, but he's apt to paw the air when he's reachingfor ideas. 

I suppose you're asking why, if I'm so hot for education, I'm againstthis post-graduate course. But habits of thought ain't the only thing afellow picks up at college. 

I see you've been elected President of your class. I'm glad the boysaren't down on you, but while the most popular man in his class isn'talways a failure in business, being as popular as that takes up a heapof time. I noticed, too, when you were home Easter, that you wererunning to sporty clothes and cigarettes. There's nothing criminal abouteither, but I don't hire sporty clerks at all, and the only part of thepremises on which cigarette smoking is allowed is the fertilizerfactory. 

I simply mention this in passing. I have every confidence in yourultimate good sense, and I guess you'll see the point without myelaborating with a meat ax my reasons for thinking that you've hadenough 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 pointa good deal like a setter pup chasing his tail. But I gather from it thatyou want to spend a couple of months in Europe before coming on here andgetting your nose in the bull-ring. Of course, you are your own boss nowand you ought to be able to judge better than any one else how much timeyou have to waste, but it seems to me, on general principles, that ayoung man of twenty-two, who is physically and mentally sound, and whohasn't got a dollar and has never earned one, can't be getting onsomebody's pay-roll too quick. And in this connection it is only fair totell you that I have instructed the cashier to discontinue yourallowance after July 15. That gives you two weeks for a vacation--enoughto make a sick boy well, or a lazy one lazier. 

I hear a good deal about men who won't take vacations, and who killthemselves by overwork, but it's usually worry or whiskey. It's not whata man does during working-hours, but after them, that breaks down hishealth. A fellow and his business should be bosom friends in the officeand sworn enemies out of it. A clear mind is one that is swept clean ofbusiness at six o'clock every night and isn't opened up for it againuntil after the shutters are taken down next morning. 

Some fellows leave the office at night and start out to whoop it up withthe boys, and some go home to sit up with their troubles--they're bothin bad company. They're the men who are always needing vacations, andnever getting any good out of them. What every man does need once a yearis a change of work--that is, if he has been curved up over a desk forfifty weeks and subsisting on birds and burgundy, he ought to take tofishing for a living and try bacon and eggs, with a little springwater, for dinner. But coming from Harvard to the packing-house willgive you change enough this year to keep you in good trim, even if youdidn'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 itis offered--especially a job. It is never easy to get one except whenyou don't want it; but when you have to get work, and go after it witha gun, you'll find it as shy as an old crow that every farmer in thecounty has had a shot at. 

When I was a young fellow and out of a place, I always made it a rule totake the first job that offered, and to use it for bait. You can catch aminnow with a worm, and a bass will take your minnow. A good fat basswill tempt an otter, and then you've got something worth skinning. Ofcourse, there's no danger of your not being able to get a job with thehouse--in fact, there is no real way in which you can escape gettingone; but I don't like to see you shy off every time the old man getsclose to you with the halter. 

I want you to learn right at the outset not to play with the spoonbefore you take the medicine. Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. Procrastination is thelongest word in the language, but there's only one letter between itsends when they occupy their proper places in the alphabet. 

Old Dick Stover, for whom I once clerked in Indiana, was the worst handat 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 overin bed mornings for just another wink and staving off getting up, untilfinally his wife combined breakfast and dinner on him, and he only gottwo meals a day. He was a mighty religious man, too, but he got toputting off saying his prayers until after he was in bed, and then hewould keep passing them along until his mind was clear of worldlythings, and in the end he would drop off to sleep without saying themat all. What between missing the Sunday morning service and never beingseen on his knees, the first thing Dick knew he was turned out of thechurch. He had a pretty good business when I first went with him, but hewould keep putting off firing his bad clerks until they had lit out withthe petty cash; and he would keep putting off raising the salaries ofhis good ones until his competitor had hired them away. Finally, he gotso that he wouldn't discount his bills, even when he had the money; andwhen they came due he would give notes so as to keep from paying out hiscash a little longer. Running a business on those lines is, of course, equivalent to making a will in favor of the sheriff and committingsuicide so that he can inherit. The last I heard of Dick he wasninety-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 aninstance of how habits rule a man's life. 

There is one excuse for every mistake a man can make, but only one. Whena fellow makes the same mistake twice he's got to throw up both handsand own up to carelessness or cussedness. Of course, I knew that youwould 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 thenumber of combinations possible by making a different sort of a fool ofyourself every time. That is the important thing, unless a fellow hastoo lively an imagination, or has none at all. You are bound to try thisEuropean foolishness sooner or later, but if you will wait a few years, you will approach it in an entirely different spirit--and you will comeback with a good deal of respect for the people who have sense enough tostay at home. 

[Illustration: "_Old Dick Stover was the worst hand at procrastinatingthat I ever saw. _"]

I piece out from your letter that you expect a few months on the otherside 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 withthe same idea, and they didn't bring back a great deal except a fewtrunks of badly fitting clothes. Seeing the world is like charity--itcovers a multitude of sins, and, like charity, it ought to begin athome. 

Culture is not a matter of a change of climate. You'll hear more aboutBrowning to the square foot in the Mississippi Valley than you will inEngland. And there's as much Art talk on the Lake front as in the LatinQuarter. It may be a little different, but it's there. 

I went to Europe once myself. I was pretty raw when I left Chicago, andI 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 easything. Every time I went into a store there was a bull movement. Theclerks all knocked off their regular work and started in to mark upprices. 

They used to tell me that they didn't have any gold-brick men overthere. So they don't. They deal in pictures--old masters, they callthem. I bought two--you know the ones--those hanging in the waiting-roomat the stock yards; and when I got back I found out that they had beenpainted by a measly little fellow who went to Paris to study art, afterBill Harris had found out that he was no good as a settling clerk. Ikeep 'em to remind myself that there's no fool like an old American foolwhen he gets this picture paresis. 

The fellow who tried to fit me out with a coat-of-arms didn't find me soeasy. I picked mine when I first went into business for myself--acharging 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 anybusiness with. It's penetrated to every quarter of the globe in the lasttwenty years, and every soldier in the world has carried it--in hisknapsack. 

I take just as much pride in it as the fellow who inherits his and can'tfind any place to put it, except on his carriage door and hisletter-head--and it's a heap more profitable. It's got so now that everyjobber in the trade knows that it stands for good quality, and that'sall any Englishman's coat-of-arms can stand for. Of course, anAmerican's can't stand for anything much--generally it's theburned-in-the-skin brand of a snob. 

After the way some of the descendants of the old New York Dutchmen withthe hoe and the English general storekeepers have turned out, Isometimes feel a little uneasy about what my great-grandchildren maydo, but we'll just stick to the trade-mark and try to live up to itwhile the old man's in the saddle. 

I simply mention these things in a general way. I have no fears for youafter you've been at work for a few years, and have struck an averagebetween the packing-house and Harvard; then if you want to graze over awider range it can't hurt you. But for the present you will findyourself 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 itsays more to the number of words used than any letter that I have everreceived from you. I remember reading once that some fellows uselanguage to conceal thought; but it's been my experience that a goodmany more use it _instead_ of thought. 

A business man's conversation should be regulated by fewer and simplerrules 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 youhave said it lands a merchant in a lawsuit or the poorhouse, and thefirst 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 friendsafter dinner to run a conversation like a Sunday-school excursion, withstops to pick flowers; but in the office your sentences should be theshortest distance possible between periods. Cut out the introduction andthe peroration, and stop before you get to secondly. You've got topreach short sermons to catch sinners; and deacons won't believe theyneed 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 littlebutter on either side of it doesn't do any harm if it's intended for aman who likes butter. 

Remember, too, that it's easier to look wise than to talk wisdom. Sayless than the other fellow and listen more than you talk; for when aman's listening he isn't telling on himself and he's flattering thefellow who is. Give most men a good listener and most women enoughnote-paper and they'll tell all they know. Money talks--but not unlessits 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 aptto be the fellow who's doing the talking; just as I'm a little afraidthat you're sometimes like the hungry drummer at the dollar-a-dayhouse--inclined to kill your appetite by eating the cake in the centreof the table before the soup comes on. 

Of course, I'm glad to see you swing into line and show the properspirit about coming on here and going to work; but you mustn't getyourself all "het up" before you take the plunge, because you're boundto find the water pretty cold at first. I've seen a good many youngfellows pass through and out of this office. The first week a lot ofthem go to work they're in a sweat for fear they'll be fired; and thesecond week for fear they won't be. By the third, a boy that's no goodhas learned just how little work he can do and keep his job; while thefellow who's got the right stuff in him is holding down his own placewith one hand and beginning to reach for the job just ahead of him withthe other. I don't mean that he's neglecting his work; but he'sbeginning to take notice, and that's a mighty hopeful sign in either ayoung clerk or a young widow. 

You've got to handle the first year of your business life about the wayyou would a trotting horse. Warm up a little before going to thepost--not enough to be in a sweat, but just enough to be limber andeager. Never start off at a gait that you can't improve on, but movealong strong and well in hand to the quarter. Let out a notch there, buttake it calm enough up to the half not to break, and hard enough not tofall back into the ruck. At the three-quarters you ought to be goingfast enough to poke your nose out of the other fellow's dust, andrunning like the Limited in the stretch. Keep your eyes to the front allthe time, and you won't be so apt to shy at the little things by theside of the track. Head up, tail over the dashboard--that's the way thewinners 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 ofthe year, when we hoist the numbers of the fellows who are good enoughto 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'twant 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 upin this world, and he can't always pick them apart. I think a heap of youand 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 goodfirst 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 allI know; but I'm dead certain there's no such thing as love at first sightin business. A man's got to keep company a long time, and come early andstay 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'vecalled you've generally got to go and fetch it yourself. 

Our bright young men have discovered how to make a pretty good articleof potted chicken, and they don't need any help from hens, either; andyou can smell the clover in our butterine if you've developed the poeticside of your nose; but none of the boys have been able to discoveranything that will pass as a substitute for work, even in aboarding-house, though I'll give some of them credit for having triedpretty hard. 

[Illustration: "_Charlie Chase told me he was President of the KlondikeExploring, Gold Prospecting and Immigration Company. _"]

I remember when I was selling goods for old Josh Jennings, back in thesixties, and had rounded up about a thousand in a savings-bank--a mightyhard thousand, that came a dollar or so at a time, and every dollar witha little bright mark where I had bit it--I roomed with a dry-goods clerknamed Charlie Chase. Charlie had a hankering to be a rich man; butsomehow he could never see any connection between that hankering and hiscounter, except that he'd hint to me sometimes about an heiress who usedto squander her father's money shamefully for the sake of having Charliewait on her. But when it came to getting rich outside the dry-goodsbusiness and getting rich in a hurry, Charlie was the man. 

Along about Tuesday night--he was paid on Saturday--he'd stay at homeand begin to scheme. He'd commence at eight o'clock and start amagazine, maybe, and before midnight he'd be turning away subscribersbecause his presses couldn't print a big enough edition. Or perhaps hewouldn't feel literary that night, and so he'd invent a system forspeculating in wheat and go on pyramiding his purchases till he'd madethe best that Cheops did look like a five-cent plate of ice cream. Allhe ever needed was a few hundred for a starter, and to get that he'ddecide to let me in on the ground floor. I want to say right here thatwhenever any one offers to let you in on the ground floor it's a prettysafe rule to take the elevator to the roof garden. I never exactlyrefused to lend Charlie the capital he needed, but we generallycompromised on half a dollar next morning, when he was in a hurry tomake the store to keep from getting docked. 

He dropped by the office last week, a little bent and seedy, but all ina glow and trembling with excitement in the old way. Told me he wasPresident of the Klondike Exploring, Gold Prospecting and ImmigrationCompany, with a capital of ten millions. I guessed that he was the boardof directors and the capital stock and the exploring and the prospectingand the immigrating, too--everything, in fact, except the business cardhe'd sent in; for Charlie always had a gift for nosing out printerswho'd trust him. Said that for the sake of old times he'd let me have afew thousand shares at fifty cents, though they would go to par in ayear. In the end we compromised on a loan of ten dollars, and Charliewent away happy. 

The swamps are full of razor-backs like Charlie, fellows who'd rathermake 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 moneythan to hire him. As a matter of fact, I have never known a fellow whowas smart enough to think for the house days and for himself nights. Aman who tries that is usually a pretty poor thinker, and he isn't muchgood to either; but if there's any choice the house gets the worst ofit. 

I simply mention these little things in a general way. If you can takemy word for some of them you are going to save yourself a whole lot oftrouble. There are others which I don't speak of because life is tooshort and because it seems to afford a fellow a heap of satisfactionto pull the trigger for himself to see if it is loaded; and a lessonlearned 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'sa pretty touchy Irishman, and I may be able to give you a point or twothat will help you to keep on his mellow side. He's apt to feel a littlesore 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 lastnight to make my train, and so had no time to tell you some things thatare laying mighty heavy on my mind this morning. 

Jim Donnelly, of the Donnelly Provision Company, came into the office inthe afternoon, with a fool grin on his fat face, to tell me that whilehe appreciated a note which he had just received in one of the firm'senvelopes, beginning "Dearest, " and containing an invitation to thetheatre to-morrow night, it didn't seem to have any real bearing on hisclaim for shortage on the last carload of sweet pickled hams he hadbought from us. 

Of course, I sent for Milligan and went for him pretty rough for havinga mailing clerk so no-account as to be writing personal letters inoffice hours, and such a blunderer as to mix them up with the firm'scorrespondence. Milligan just stood there like a dumb Irishman and letme get through and go back and cuss him out all over again, with sometrimmings that I had forgotten the first time, before he told me thatyou were the fellow who had made the bull. Naturally, I felt prettyfoolish, and, while I tried to pass it off with something about yourstill being green and raw, the ice was mighty thin, and you had theold man running tiddledies. 

It didn't make me feel any sweeter about the matter to hear that whenMilligan went for you, and asked what you supposed Donnelly would thinkof that sort of business, you told him to "consider the feelings of thegirl who got our brutal refusal to allow a claim for a few hundredweightof hams. "

I haven't any special objection to your writing to girls and tellingthem that they are the real sugar-cured article, for, after all, if youoverdo it, it's your breach-of-promise suit, but you must write beforeeight or after six. I have bought the stretch between those hours. Yourtime is money--my money--and when you take half an hour of it for yourown purposes, that is just a petty form of petty larceny. 

Milligan tells me that you are quick to learn, and that you can do apowerful lot of work when you've a mind to; but he adds that it's mightyseldom your mind takes that particular turn. Your attention may be onthe letters you are addressing, or you may be in a comatose conditionmentally; he never quite knows until the returns come from thedead-letter office. 

A man can't have his head pumped out like a vacuum pan, or stuffed fullof odds and ends like a bologna sausage, and do his work right. Itdoesn't make any difference how mean and trifling the thing he's doingmay 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, intoatoms. And the fundamental principles which govern the handling ofpostage stamps and of millions are exactly the same. They are the commonlaw 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 manwon't. 

Boys are constantly writing me for advice about how to succeed, and whenI send them my receipt they say that I am dealing out commonplacegeneralities. Of course I am, but that's what the receipt calls for, andif a boy will take these commonplace generalities and knead them intohis job, the mixture'll be cake. 

[Illustration: "_Jim Donnelly of the Donnelly Provision Company cameinto my office with a fool grin on his fat face. _"]

Once a fellow's got the primary business virtues cemented into hischaracter, he's safe to build on. But when a clerk crawls into theoffice in the morning like a sick setter pup, and leaps from his stoolat night with the spring of a tiger, I'm a little afraid that if I senthim off to take charge of a branch house he wouldn't always be aroundwhen customers were. He's the sort of a chap who would hold back the sunan hour every morning and have it gain two every afternoon if the Lordwould give him the same discretionary powers that He gave Joshua. And Ihave noticed that he's the fellow who invariably takes a timekeeper as aninsult. He's pretty numerous in business offices; in fact, if the glanceof the human eye could affect a clockface in the same way that a man'scountry cousins affect their city welcome, I should have to buy a newtimepiece for the office every morning. 

I remember when I was a boy, we used to have a pretty livelycamp-meeting every summer, and Elder Hoover, who was accounted apowerful exhorter in our parts, would wrastle with the sinners and thebacksliders. There was one old chap in the town--Bill Budlong--who tooka heap of pride in being the simon pure cuss. Bill was always the lastman to come up to the mourners' bench at the camp-meeting and the firstone to backslide when it was over. Used to brag around about what ahold Satan had on him and how his sin was the original brand, directfrom Adam, put up in cans to keep, and the can-opener lost. Doc Hooverwould get the whole town safe in the fold and then have to hold extrameetings for a couple of days to snake in that miserable Bill; but, inthe end, he always got religion and got it hard. For a month or twoafterward, he'd make the chills run down the backs of us children inprayer-meeting, telling how he had probably been the triflingest andorneriest man alive before he was converted. Then, along towardhog-killing time, he'd backslide, and go around bragging that he wasstanding so close to the mouth of the pit that his whiskers smelt ofbrimstone. 

He kept this up for about ten years, getting vainer and vainer of hisstaying qualities, until one summer, when the Elder had rounded up allthe likeliest sinners in the bunch, he announced that the meetings wereover for that year. 

You never saw a sicker-looking man than Bill when he heard that therewasn't going to be any extra session for him. He got up and said hereckoned another meeting would fetch him; that he sort of felt theclutch of old Satan loosening; but Doc Hoover was firm. Then Bill beggedto have a special deacon told off to wrastle with him, but Doc wouldn'tlisten to that. Said he'd been wasting time enough on him for ten yearsto save a county, and he had just about made up his mind to let him tryhis luck by himself; that what he really needed more than religion wascommon-sense and a conviction that time in this world was too valuableto be frittered away. If he'd get that in his head he didn't think he'dbe so apt to trifle with eternity; and if he didn't get it, religionwouldn't be of any special use to him. 

A big merchant finds himself in Doc Hoover's fix pretty often. There aretoo many likely young sinners in his office to make it worth while tobother long with the Bills. Very few men are worth wasting time onbeyond a certain point, and that point is soon reached with a fellow whodoesn't show any signs of wanting to help. Naturally, a green man alwayscomes to a house in a pretty subordinate position, and it isn't possibleto make so much noise with a firecracker as with a cannon. But you cantell a good deal by what there is left of the boy, when you come toinventory him on the fifth of July, whether he'll be safe to trust witha cannon next year. 

It isn't the little extra money that you may make for the house bylearning the fundamental business virtues which counts so much as it isthe 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 aroundfor the fellow to fill the vacancy just ahead of you. He's pretty apt topick some one who keeps separate ledger accounts for work and for fun, who gives the house sixteen ounces to the pound, and, on generalprinciples, to pass by the one who is late at the end where he ought tobe early, and early at the end where he ought to be late. 

I simply mention these things in passing, but, frankly, I am afraid thatyou have a streak of the Bill in you; and you can't be a good clerk, letalone a partner, until you get it out. I try not to be narrow when I'mweighing up a young fellow, and to allow for soakage and leakage, andthen to throw in a little for good feeling; but I don't trade with aman 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 itdoesn't raise more hogs. It seems to take a farmer a long time to learnthat 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 wasdead 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 hotevery 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 anyother man, for it shows a fundamental weakness. And then, too, the houseisn't interested in knowing how you like your boss, but in how he likesyou. 

I understand all about Milligan. He's a cross, cranky old Irishman witha temper tied up in bow-knots, who prods his men with the bull-stick sixdays a week and schemes to get them salary raises on the seventh, whenhe ought to be listening to the sermon; who puts the black-snake on aclerk's hide when he sends a letter to Oshkosh that ought to go toKalamazoo, and begs him off when the old man wants to have him fired forit. Altogether he's a hard, crabbed, generous, soft-hearted, loyal, bully old boy, who's been with the house since we took down the shuttersfor the first time, and who's going to stay with it till we put them upfor the last time. 

But all that apart, you want to get it firmly fixed in your mind thatyou're going to have a Milligan over you all your life, and if it isn'ta Milligan it will be a Jones or a Smith, and the chances are thatyou'll find them both harder to get along with than this old fellow. Andif it isn't Milligan or Jones or Smith, and you ain't a butcher, but aparson or a doctor, or even the President of the United States, it'll bea way-back deacon, or the undertaker, or the machine. There isn't anysuch 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. Keepyour self-respect at any cost, and your upper lip stiff at the samefigure. Criticism can properly come only from above, and whenever youdiscover that your boss is no good you may rest easy that the man whopays his salary shares your secret. Learn to give back a bit from thebase-burner, to let the village fathers get their feet on the fender andthe sawdust box in range, and you'll find them making a little room foryou in turn. Old men have tender feet, and apologies are poor salve foraching corns. Remember that when you're in the right you can afford tokeep your temper, and that when you're in the wrong you can't afford tolose it. 

When you've got an uncertain cow it's all O. K. To tie a figure eight inher tail, if you ain't thirsty, and it's excitement you're after; but ifyou want peace and her nine quarts, you will naturally approach her fromthe side, and say, So-boss, in about the same tone that you would use ifyou were asking your best girl to let you hold her hand. 

Of course, you want to be sure of your natural history facts and learnto distinguish between a cow that's a kicker, but whose intentions aregood if she's approached with proper respect, and a hooker, who isvicious on general principles, and any way you come at her. There'snever any use fooling with an animal of that sort, brute or human. Theonly safe place is the other side of the fence or the top of the nearesttree. 

[Illustration: "_Bill Budlong was always the last man to come up to themourners' bench. _"]

When I was clerking in Missouri, a fellow named Jeff Hankins moved downfrom Wisconsin and bought a little clearing just outside the town. Jeffwas a good talker, but a bad listener, and so we learned a heap abouthow things were done in Wisconsin, but he didn't pick up muchinformation about the habits of our Missouri fauna. When it came tocows, he had had a liberal education and he made out all right, but byand by it got on to ploughing time and Jeff naturally bought a mule--alittle moth-eaten cuss, with sad, dreamy eyes and droopy, wiggly-wogglyears that swung in a circle as easy as if they ran on ball-bearings. Herowner didn't give her a very good character, but Jeff was too busy tellinghow much he knew about horses to pay much attention to what anybody wassaying 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 herright, and hurried off out of range. 

Next morning at sunup Jeff picked out a bridle and started off whistlingBuffalo Gals--he was a powerful pretty whistler and could do the MockingBird with variations--to catch the mule and begin his plowing. Theanimal was feeding as peaceful as a water-color picture, and she didn'tbudge; but when Jeff began to get nearer, her ears dropped back alongher neck as if they had lead in them. He knew that symptom and so heclosed up kind of cautious, aiming for her at right angles and gurgling, "Muley, muley, here muley; that's a good muley, " sort of soothing andcaressing-like. Still she didn't stir and Jeff got right up to her andput 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 wejudged from the marks on his person that the mule had reached forwardand kicked the seat of his trousers with one of her prehensile hindfeet; and had reached back and caught him on the last button of hiswaistcoat with one of her limber fore feet; and had twisted around herelastic neck and bit off a mouthful of his hair. When Jeff regainedconsciousness, he reckoned that the only really safe way to approach amule was to drop on it from a balloon. 

I simply mention this little incident as an example of the fact thatthere are certain animals with which the Lord didn't intend white men tofool. And you will find that, as a rule, the human varieties of them arenot the fellows who go for you rough-shod, like Milligan, when you'rewrong. It's when you come across one of those gentlemen who have moreoil 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 andapproachable, but you want to learn to distinguish between him and onewho is too affable and too approachable. The adverb makes the differencebetween a good and a bad fellow. The bunco men aren't all at the countyfair, and they don't all operate with the little shells and the elusivepea. When a packer has learned all that there is to learn aboutquadrupeds, he knows only one-eighth of his business; the otherseven-eighths, and the important seven-eighths, has to do with the studyof bipeds. 

I dwell on this because I am a little disappointed that you should havemade such a mistake in sizing up Milligan. He isn't the brightest man inthe office, but he is loyal to me and to the house, and when you havebeen in business as long as I have you will be inclined to put a prettyhigh value on loyalty. It is the one commodity that hasn't any marketvalue, and it's the one that you can't pay too much for. You can trustany 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 othersix. 

A good many young fellows come to me looking for jobs, and start in bytelling me what a mean house they have been working for; what a cuss toget 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 ofthat class, because I know that he wouldn't like me or the house if hecame to work for us. 

I don't know anything that a young business man ought to keep moreentirely to himself than his dislikes, unless it is his likes. It'sgenerally expensive to have either, but it's bankruptcy to tell aboutthem. It's all right to say nothing about the dead but good, but it'sbetter to apply the rule to the living, and especially to the housewhich is paying your salary. 

Just one word before I close, as old Doc Hoover used to say, when he wascoming 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 starchyaround the office. Of course, it's good business, when a fellow hasn'tmuch behind his forehead, to throw out his chest and attract attentionto his shirt-front. But as you begin to meet the men who have donesomething 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 whilethey talk. 

Superiority makes every man feel its equal. It is courtesy withoutcondescension; affability without familiarity; self-sufficiency withoutselfishness; simplicity without snide. It weighs sixteen ounces to thepound without the package, and it doesn't need a four-colored label tomake it go. 

We are coming home from here. I am a little disappointed in the showingthat this house has been making. Pound for pound it is not gettingnearly so much out of its hogs as we are in Chicago. I don't know justwhere the leak is, but if they don't do better next month I am comingback here with a shotgun, and there's going to be a pretty heavymortality 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 tillthey've pretty nearly taken all the hair off my hide, but that orsomething else has loosened up my joints so that they don't squeak anymore when I walk. The doctor says he'll have my rheumatism cured inthirty days, so I guess you can expect me home in about a fortnight. Forhe'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 dollarsevery time he has a look in at my tongue, against two that I would paythe family doctor for gratifying his curiosity. But I guess thisspecialist business is about the only outlet for marketing the surplusof young doctors. 

Reminds me of the time when we were piling up canned corned beef instock faster than people would eat it, and a big drought happened alongin Texas and began driving the canners in to the packing-house quickerthan we could tuck them away in tin. Jim Durham tried to "stimulate theconsumption, " 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 cornedbeef on the family in various disguises; but, after he had schemed outten different combinations, the other ninety turned out to be corned-beefhash. So that was no use. 

But one day we got together and had a nice, fancy, appetizing labelprinted, and we didn't economize on the gilt--a picture of a steer sofat that he looked as if he'd break his legs if they weren't shored uppretty quick with props, and with blue ribbons tied to his horns. Welabeled it "Blue Ribbon Beef--For Fancy Family Trade, " and charged anextra ten cents a dozen for the cans on which that special label waspasted. Of course, people just naturally wanted it. 

There's nothing helps convince some men that a thing has merit like alittle gold on the label. And it's pretty safe to bet that if a fellowneeds a six or seven-syllabled word to describe his profession, he's acorn doctor when you come to look him up in the dictionary. And thenyou'll generally find him in the back part of the book where they tuckaway the doubtful words. 

But that isn't what I started out to say. I want to tell you that I wasvery, very glad to learn from your letter that you had been promoted tothe billing desk. I have felt all along that when you got a little ofthe 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 thingsyou just naturally don't expect from human nature--that the widow'stombstone estimate of the departed, on which she is trying to convincethe neighbors against their better judgment that he went to Heaven, andthe father's estimate of the son, on which he is trying to pass himalong into a good salary, will be conservative. 

I had that driven into my mind and spiked down when I hired the widow'sson a few years ago. His name was Clarence--Clarence St. ClairHicks--and his father used to keep books for me when he wasn't pickingthe winners at Washington Park or figuring out the batting averages ofthe Chicagos. He was one of those quick men who always have their booksposted 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 thatthey are out on the trial balance. When he died his wife found that hislife insurance had lapsed the month before, and so she brought Clarencedown to the office and asked me to give him a job. 

Clarence wasn't exactly a pretty boy; in fact, he looked to me likeanother of his father's bad breaks; but his mother seemed to think aheap of him. I learned that he would have held the belt in hisSunday-school for long-distance verse-reciting if the mother of one ofthe other boys hadn't fixed the superintendent, and that it had taken ageneral conspiracy of the teachers in his day-school to keep him fromwalking off with the good-conduct medal. 

I couldn't just reconcile those statements with Clarence's face, but Iaccepted him at par and had him passed along to the head errand boy. Hismother cried a little when she saw him marched off, and asked me to seethat 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 thehead 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 thevault filled with cigarette smoke and Clarence in it hunting forsomething he couldn't describe. But as he was a new boy, no one wasdisposed to bear down on him very hard, so his cigarettes were takenaway from him and he was sent back to his bench with a warning that hehad used up all his explanations. 

Along toward noon, a big Boston customer came in with his little boy--anice, plump, stall-fed youngster, with black velvet pants and hair thatwas just a little longer than was safe in the stock-yards district. Andwhile we were talking business, the kid wandered off to the coat-room, where the errand boys were eating lunch, which was a pretty desperateplace for a boy with velvet pants on to go. 

[Illustration: "_Clarence looked to me like another of his father's badbreaks. _"]

As far as we could learn from Willie when he came out of hisconvulsions, the boys had been very polite to him and had insisted onhis joining in a new game which Clarence had just invented, calledplaying pig-sticker. And, because he was company, Clarence told him thathe 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 afraidhe wouldn't like it. So he tried to pass along the honor to some oneelse, but Clarence insisted that it was "hot stuff to be the pig, " andbefore Willie could rightly judge what was happening to him, one end ofa rope had been tied around his left ankle and the other end had beenpassed over a transom bar, and he was dangling headforemost in the air, while Clarence threatened his jugular with a lath sword. That was whenhe let out the yell which brought his father and me on the jump andscattered the boys all over the stock yards. 

Willie's father canceled his bologna contract and marched off mutteringsomething about "degrading surroundings brutalizing the young;" andClarence's mother wrote me that I was a bad old man who had held herhusband 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 beenraised 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 littleslow to trust my judgment on my own. I have always found that, wheneverI thought a heap of anything I owned, there was nothing like getting theother fellow's views expressed in figures; and the other fellow isusually a pessimist when he's buying. The lady on the dollar is the onlywoman who hasn't any sentiment in her make-up. And if you really want alook at the solid facts of a thing you must strain off the sentimentfirst. 

I put you under Milligan to get a view of you through his eyes. If hesays that you are good enough to be a billing clerk, and to draw twelvedollars a week, I guess there's no doubt about it. For he's one ofthose men that never show any real enthusiasm except when they'recussing. 

Naturally, it's a great satisfaction to see a streak or two of businessability beginning to show under the knife, because when it comes closingtime for me it will make it a heap easier to know that some one whobears the name will take down the shutters in the morning. 

Boys are a good deal like the pups that fellows sell on streetcorners--they don't always turn out as represented. You buy a likelysetter pup and raise a spotted coach dog from it, and the promising sonof an honest butcher is just as like as not to turn out a poet or aprofessor. I want to say in passing that I have no real prejudiceagainst 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 whowas a little sore on the poetry business once put it. Of course, apacker who understands something about the versatility of cottonseedoil need never turn down orders for lard because the run of hogs islight, and a father who understands human nature can turn out animitation parson from a boy whom the Lord intended to go on the Board ofTrade. But on general principles it's best to give your cottonseed oil aLatin name and to market it on its merits, and to let your boy followhis bent, even if it leads him into the wheat pit. If a fellow has gotpoetry in him it's bound to come out sooner or later in the papers orthe street cars; and the longer you keep it bottled up the harder itcomes, and the longer it takes the patient to recover. There's no easierway to cure foolishness than to give a man leave to be foolish. And theonly way to show a fellow that he's chosen the wrong business is to lethim try it. If it really is the wrong thing you won't have to argue withhim 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 tomind the case of my old friend Jeremiah Simpkins' son. There isn't asolider man in the Boston leather trade than Jeremiah, nor a biggerscamp that the law can't touch than his son Ezra. There isn't an ounceof real meanness in Ezra's whole body, but he's just naturally andunintentionally a maverick. When he came out of college his fatherthought that a few years' experience in the hide department of Graham &Co. Would be a good thing for him before he tackled the leatherbusiness. 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 lookas 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 theovercrowding of the brain, or bulged by the thickening of the skull, according as you like or dislike the man. His manners were easy orfamiliar by the same standard. He told me right at the start that, whilehe didn't know just what he wanted to do, he was dead sure that itwasn't the leather business. It seemed that he had said the same thingto his father and that the old man had answered, "Tut, tut, " and toldhim to forget it and to learn hides. 

Simpkins learned all that he wanted to know about the packing industryin thirty days, and I learned all that I wanted to know about Ezra inthe same time. Pork-packing seemed to be the only thing that he wasn'tinterested in. I got his resignation one day just five minutes beforethe one which I was having written out for him was ready; for I will doSimpkins the justice to say that there was nothing slow about him. Heand his father split up, temporarily, over it, and, of course, it costme the old man's trade and friendship. I want to say right here that theeasiest 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 theoffice one morning as friendly and familiar as ever. Said he was areporter and wanted to interview me on the December wheat deal. Ofcourse, I wouldn't talk on that, but I gave him a little fatherlyadvice--told him he would sleep in a hall bedroom all his life if hedidn't quit his foolishness and go back to his father, though I didn'treally believe it. He thanked me and went off and wrote a column aboutwhat I might have said about December wheat, and somehow gave theimpression that I had said it. 

The next I heard of Simpkins he was dead. The Associated Pressdispatches announced it, the Cuban Junta confirmed it, and last of all, a long dispatch from Simpkins himself detailed the circumstances leadingup 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 editorand get at the facts for him. It seemed that the paper had thought a heapof Simpkins, and that he had been sent out to Cuba as a correspondent, andstationed with the Insurgent army. Simpkins in Cuba had evidently lived upto the reputation of Simpkins in Chicago. When there was any news he sentit, 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 acrosson a filibustering steamer and wired on from Jacksonville. It told, withclose attention to detail--something he had learned since he leftme--how he had strayed away from the little band of insurgents withwhich he had been out scouting and had blundered into the Spanish lines. He had been promptly made a prisoner, and, despite his papers provinghis American citizenship, and the nature of his job, and the red crosson his sleeve, he had been tried by drumhead court martial and sentencedto be shot at dawn. All this he had written out, and then, that hisaccount might be complete, he had gone on and imagined his ownexecution. This was written in a sort of pigeon, or perhaps you wouldcall it black Spanish, English, and let on to be the work of theeyewitness to whom Simpkins had confided his letter. He had been thesentry over the prisoner, and for a small bribe in hand and the promiseof a larger one from the paper, he had turned his back on Simpkins whilehe wrote out the story, and afterward had deserted and carried it to theCuban lines. 

The account ended: "Then, as the order to fire was given by thelieutenant, Señor Simpkins raised his eyes toward Heaven and cried: 'Iprotest in the name of my American citizenship!'" At the end of theletter, and not intended for publication, was scrawled: "This is a bullyscoop 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----dthoughtful boy. Why, he even remembered to inclose descriptions for thepictures!"

Simpkins' last story covered the whole of the front page and threecolumns of the second, and it just naturally sold cords of papers. Hiseditor demanded that the State Department take it up, though theSpaniards denied the execution or any previous knowledge of any suchperson as this Señor Simpkins. That made another page in the paper, ofcourse, and then they got up a memorial service, which was good forthree 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 buyflowers for the deceased aunt of the cellar boss' wife, managed tocollect twenty dollars among our clerks, and they sent a floralnotebook, 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 hisfather. But I had hardly got back to the office before I received a wirefrom Jamaica, reading: "Cable your correspondent here let me havehundred. 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 away as not to attract any special attention to himself. He managed toget the impression around that he'd been snatched from the jaws of deathby a rescue party at the last moment. The last I heard of him he was inNew York and drawing ten thousand a year, which was more than he couldhave worked up to in the leather business in a century. 

Fifty or a hundred years ago, when there was good money in poetry, a manwith Simpkins' imagination would naturally have been a bard, as Ibelieve they used to call the top-notchers; and, once he was turnedloose to root for himself, he instinctively smelled out the businesswhere 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 torun a fox with him. I was a little uncertain about you at first, but Iguess the Lord intended you to hunt with the pack. Get the scent in yournostrils and keep your nose to the ground, and don't worry too muchabout the end of the chase. The fun of the thing's in the run and not inthe 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 Iopened 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 justplace Miss Dashkam, but if she's the daughter of old Job Dashkam, on theopen Board, I should say, on general principles, that she was a finegirl to let some other fellow marry. The last time I saw her, sheinventoried about $10, 000 as she stood--allowing that her diamonds wouldscratch glass--and that's more capital than any woman has a right to tieup on her back, I don't care how rich her father is. And Job's fortuneis one of that brand which foots up to a million in the newspapers andleaves 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 fencewhile a heap of fellows were getting it, and I should say that marryinga woman like Mabel Dashkam would be the first step toward becoming agrass widower. I'll bet if you'll tell her you're making twelve a weekand ain't going to get any more till you earn it, you'll find that youcan't push within a mile of her even on a Soo ice-breaker. She's one ofthose women with a heart like a stock-ticker--it doesn't beat overanything except money. 

Of course you're in no position yet to think of being engaged even, andthat'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 akeeper more than a wife. I want to say right here that there alwayscomes a time to the fellow who blows fifty-two dollars at a lick onroses when he thinks how many staple groceries he could have boughtwith the money. After all, there's no fool like a young fool, becausein 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 judgmentin this matter, because, while a young fellow will consult his fatherabout buying a horse, he's cock-sure of himself when it comes to pickinga wife. Marriages may be made in Heaven, but most engagements are madein the back parlor with the gas so low that a fellow doesn't really geta square look at what he's taking. While a man doesn't see much of agirl's family when he's courting, he's apt to see a good deal of it whenhe's housekeeping; and while he doesn't marry his wife's father, there'snothing in the marriage vow to prevent the old man from borrowing moneyof him, and you can bet if he's old Job Dashkam he'll do it. A man can'tpick his own mother, but he can pick his son's mother, and when hechooses a father-in-law who plays the bucket shops, he needn't besurprised if his own son plays the races. 

Never marry a poor girl who's been raised like a rich one. She's simplytraded the virtues of the poor for the vices of the rich without goinglong on their good points. To marry for money or to marry without moneyis a crime. There's no real objection to marrying a woman with afortune, but there is to marrying a fortune with a woman. Money makesthe mare go, and it makes her cut up, too, unless she's used to it andyou drive her with a snaffle-bit. 

While you are at it, there's nothing like picking out a good-lookingwife, because even the handsomest woman looks homely sometimes, and soyou get a little variety; but a homely one can only look worse thanusual. Beauty is only skin deep, but that's deep enough to satisfy anyreasonable man. (I want to say right here that to get any sense out of aproverb 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 ifthey're going to hitch up into a well-matched team, there's nothing likepicking 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 findyourself roped and branded any day, without quite knowing how ithappened, and I want you to understand that the girl who marries you formy money is getting a package of green goods in more ways than one. Ithink, though, if you really understood what marrying on twelve a weekmeant, you would have bought a bedroom set instead of roses with thatfifty-two you owe. 

Speaking of marrying the old man's money by proxy naturally takes meback to my old town in Missouri and the case of Chauncey WitherspoonHoskins. Chauncey's father was the whole village, barring the railroadstation and the saloon, and, of course, Chauncey thought that he wassomething of a pup himself. So he was, but not just the kind thatChauncey thought he was. He stood about five foot three in his pumps, had a nice pinky complexion, pretty wavy hair, and a curly mustache. Allhe 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 hishead. At the church sociables he used to hop around among them, chippingand chirping like a dicky-bird picking up seed; and he was a great handto play the piano, and sing saddish, sweetish songs to them. Always saidthe smooth thing and said it easy. Never had to choke and swallow tofetch it up. Never stepped through his partner's dress when he began todance, or got flustered when he brought her refreshments and poured thecoffee in her lap to cool instead of in the saucer. We boys whocouldn't walk across the floor without feeling that our pants had hikedup till they showed our feet to the knees, and that we were carrying acouple 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 exceptmen; and it's mighty lucky that she slips up there or we'd pretty nighall be bachelors. I might add that you can't trust a man's taste onwomen, either, and that's pretty lucky, too, because there are a goodmany old maids in the world as it is. 

One time or another Chauncey lolled in the best room of every house inour town, and we used to wonder how he managed to browse up and down thestreets that way without getting into the pound. I never found out tillafter I married your Ma, and she told me Chauncey's heart secrets. Itreally wasn't violating any confidence, because he'd told them to everygirl in town. 

Seems he used to get terribly sad as soon as he was left alone with agirl and began to hint about a tragedy in his past--something that hadblighted his whole life and left him without the power to loveagain--and lots more slop from the same pail. 

Of course, every girl in that town had known Chauncey since he woreshort pants, and ought to have known that the nearest to a tragedy hehad ever been was when he sat in the top gallery of a Chicago theatreand saw a lot of barnstormers play Othello. But some people, andespecially very young people, don't think anything's worth believingunless it's hard to believe. 

Chauncey worked along these lines until he was twenty-four, and then hemade a mistake. Most of the girls that he had grown up with had marriedoff, and while he was waiting for a new lot to come along, he began toshine up to the widow Sharpless, a powerful, well-preserved woman offorty or thereabouts, who had been born with her eye-teeth cut. Hefound her uncommon sympathetic. And when Chauncey finally came out ofhis 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, andwhen they went out in double harness strangers used to annoy himconsiderable by patting him on the head and saying to his wife: "What abright-looking chap your son is, Mrs. Hoskins!"

She was almost seventy when Chauncey buried her a while back, and theysay 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 wasplenty of room in them to hold all his grief without stretching--and hiscourting into another sixty. And four months after date he presented hismatrimonial papers for acceptance. Said he was tired of thismother-and-son foolishness, and wasn't going to leave any room for doubtthis time. Didn't propose to have people sizing his wife up for one ofhis ancestors any more. So he married Lulu Littlebrown, who was justturned eighteen. Chauncey was over fifty then, and wizened up like alate pippin that has been out overnight in an early frost. 

He took Lu to Chicago for the honeymoon, and Mose Greenebaum, who happenedto be going up to town for his fall goods, got into the parlor car withthem. 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!" Andthe porter just naturally got. 

Mose had been taking it all in, and now he went back to the smoking-roomand passed the word along to the drummers there. Every little while oneof them would lounge up the aisle to Chauncey and ask if he couldn'tlend his daughter a magazine, or give her an orange, or bring her adrink. And the language that he gave back in return for these courtesieswasn't at all fitting in a bridegroom. Then Mose had another happythought, and dropped off at a way station and wired the clerk at thePalmer House. 

When they got to the hotel the clerk was on the lookout for them, andChauncey hadn't more than signed his name before he reached out over hisdiamond and said: "Ah, Mr. Hoskins; would you like to have your daughternear you?"

I simply mention Chauncey in passing as an example of the foolishness ofthinking you can take any chances with a woman who has really decidedthat she wants to marry, or that you can average up matrimonialmistakes. And I want you to remember that marrying the wrong girl isthe 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 shewon'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 alittle uneasy; for you looked so blamed important and chesty that I aminclined to think you will tell the first customer who says he doesn'tlike our sausage that he knows what he can do about it. Repartee makesreading lively, but business dull. And what the house needs is moreorders. 

Sausage is the one subject of all others that a fellow in the packingbusiness ought to treat solemnly. Half the people in the world take ajoke seriously from the start, and the other half if you repeat it oftenenough. Only last week the head of our sausage department started to putout a tin-tag brand of frankfurts, but I made him take it off the marketquicker than lightning, because I knew that the first fool who saw thetin-tag would ask if that was the license. And, though people wouldgrin a little at first, they'd begin to look serious after a while; andwhenever the butcher tried to sell them our brand they'd imagine theyheard the bark, and ask for "that real country sausage" at twice as mucha pound. 

He laughs best who doesn't laugh at all when he's dealing with thepublic. It has been my experience that, even when a man has a sense ofhumor, it only really carries him to the point where he will join in alaugh at the expense of the other fellow. There's nothing in the worldsicker-looking than the grin of the man who's trying to join in heartilywhen the laugh's on him, and to pretend that he likes it. 

Speaking of sausage with a registered pedigree calls to mind a littleexperience that I had last year. A fellow came into the office here witha shriveled-up toy spaniel, one of those curly, hairy little fellowsthat a woman will kiss, and then grumble because a fellow's mustachetickles. Said he wanted to sell him. I wasn't really disposed to add a dogto my troubles, but on general principles I asked him what he wanted forthe little cuss. 

[Illustration: "_You looked so blamed important and chesty when youstarted off. _"]

The fellow hawed and choked and wiped away a tear. Finally, he fetchedout that he loved the dog like a son, and that it broke his heart tothink of parting with him; that he wouldn't dare look Dandy in the faceafter he had named the price he was asking for him, and that it was therecord-breaking, marked-down sacrifice sale of the year on dogs; that itwasn'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 trustme to treat Dandy kindly; so--as a gift--he would let me have him forfive 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 ofdignified reproof, "and less of quantity, your brand would enjoy abetter reputation. "

I was pretty hot, I can tell you, but I had laid myself open, so I justsaid: "The sausage business is too poor to warrant our paying any suchprice 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 walkedoff. 

I simply mention this little incident as an example of the fact thatwhen a man cracks a joke in the Middle Ages he's apt to affect thesausage market in the Nineteenth Century, and to lay open an honestbutcher to the jeers of every dog-stealer in the street. There's such athing as carrying a joke too far, and the fellow who keeps on pretendingto believe that he's paying for pork and getting dog is pretty apt toget dog in the end. 

But all that aside, I want you to get it firmly fixed in your mind rightat the start that this trip is only an experiment, and that I am not atall sure you were cut out by the Lord to be a drummer. But you canfigure on one thing--that you will never become the pride of the pond bystarting 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 usesthe 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, andyou'll find that knowing how many rounds the Old 'Un can last againstthe Boiler-Maker won't really help you to load up the junior partnerwith our Corn-fed brand hams. 

A good many salesmen have an idea that buyers are only interested inbaseball, and funny stories, and Tom Lipton, and that business is a sideline with them; but as a matter of fact mighty few men work up to theposition of buyer through giving up their office hours to listening toanecdotes. I never saw one that liked a drummer's jokes more than aneighth of a cent a pound on a tierce of lard. What the house reallysends you out for is orders. 

Of course, you want to be nice and mellow with the trade, but alwaysremember that mellowness carried too far becomes rottenness. You can buysome fellows with a cheap cigar and some with a cheap compliment, andthere's no objection to giving a man what he likes, though I never knewsmoking to do anything good except a ham, or flattery to help any oneexcept 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 rundown yours. Don't get on your knees for business, but don't hold yournose so high in the air that an order can travel under it without yourseeing it. You'll meet a good many people on the road that you won'tlike, but the house needs their business. 

Some fellows will tell you that we play the hose on our dry salt meatbefore we ship it, and that it shrinks in transit like a Baxter StreetJew's all-wool suits in a rainstorm; that they wonder how we manage topack solid gristle in two-pound cans without leaving a little meathanging to it; and that the last car of lard was so strong that it cameback of its own accord from every retailer they shipped it to. The firstfellow will be lying, and the second will be exaggerating, and the thirdmay be telling the truth. With him you must settle on the spot; butalways remember that a man who's making a claim never underestimates hiscase, and that you can generally compromise for something less than thefirst figure. With the second you must sympathize, and say that thematter will be reported to headquarters and the boss of the canning-roomcalled up on the carpet and made to promise that it will never happenagain. 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 thecar weighed out more than it was billed, and that the fellow played thehose on it himself and added a thousand pounds of cheap salt before hejobbed it out to his trade. 

Where you're going to slip up at first is in knowing which is which, butif you don't learn pretty quick you'll not travel very far for thehouse. For your own satisfaction I will say right here that you may knowyou 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 longletters, and we won't have a great deal of time to read them, for wewill be very, very busy here making and shipping the goods. We aren'tspecially interested in orders that the other fellow gets, or in knowinghow it happened after it has happened. If you like life on the road yousimply won't let it happen. So just send us your address every day andyour orders. They will tell us all that we want to know about "thesituation. "

I was cured of sending information to the house when I was very, veryyoung--in fact, on the first trip which I made on the road. I wastraveling out of Chicago for Hammer & Hawkins, wholesale dry-goods, gents' furnishings and notions. They started me out to round up trade inthe river towns down Egypt ways, near Cairo. 

I hadn't more than made my first town and sized up the population beforeI began to feel happy, because I saw that business ought to be very goodthere. It appeared as if everybody in that town needed something in myline. The clerk of the hotel where I registered wore a dicky and hiscuffs were tied to his neck by pieces of string run up his sleeves, andmost of the merchants on Main Street were in their shirt-sleeves--atleast those that had shirts were--and so far as I could judge therewasn't a whole pair of galluses among them. Some were using wire, some alittle rope, and others just faith--buckled extra tight. Pride of thePrairie XXX flour sacks seemed to be the nobby thing in boys' suitingsthere. Take it by and large, if ever there was a town which looked as ifit had a big, short line of dry-goods, gents' furnishings and notions tocover, it was that one. 

But when I caught the proprietor of the general store during a lull inthe demand for navy plug, he wouldn't even look at my samples, and whenI began to hint that the people were pretty ornery dressers he reckonedthat he "would paste me one if I warn't so young. " Wanted to know what Imeant by coming swelling around in song-and-dance clothes and gettingfunny at the expense of people who made their living honestly. Allowedthat when it came to a humorous get-up my clothes were the originalend-man's gag. 

I noticed on the way back to the hotel that every fellow holding up ahitching-post was laughing, and I began to look up and down the streetfor the joke, not understanding at first that the reason why I couldn'tsee it was because I was it. Right there I began to learn that, whilethe Prince of Wales may wear the correct thing in hats, it's safer whenyou're out of his sphere of influence to follow the styles that thehotel clerk sets; that the place to sell clothes is in the city, whereevery one seems to have plenty of them; and that the place to sell messpork is in the country, where every one keeps hogs. That is why when afellow comes to me for advice about moving to a new country, where thereare more opportunities, I advise him--if he is built right--to go to anold city where there is more money. 

I wrote in to the house pretty often on that trip, explaining how itwas, going over the whole situation very carefully, and telling what ourcompetitors were doing, wherever I could find that they were doinganything. 

I gave old Hammer credit for more curiosity than he possessed, becausewhen I reached Cairo I found a telegram from him reading: "_Know whatour competitors are doing: they are getting all the trade. But what areyou doing?_" I saw then that the time for explaining was gone and thatthe moment for resigning had arrived; so I just naturally sent in myresignation. 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 thefellow who invented fractions, because while your selling cost for lastmonth was within the limit, it took a good deal of help from the decimalsystem to get it there. You are in the position of the boy who waschased by the bull--open to congratulations because he reached the treefirst, and to condolence because a fellow up a tree, in the middle of aforty-acre lot, with a disappointed bull for company, is in a mighty badfix. 

I don't want to bear down hard on you right at the beginning of yourlife on the road, but I would feel a good deal happier over your showingif you would make a downright failure or a clean-cut success once in awhile, instead of always just skinning through this way. It looks to meas if you were trying only half as hard as you could, and in tryingit's the second half that brings results. If there's one piece ofknowledge 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 ahalf-way place on a half-way salary by doing half the work you arecapable of, but you've got to add dynamite and ginger and jounce to yourequipment if you want to get the other half that's coming to you. You'vegot to believe that the Lord made the first hog with the Graham brandburned in the skin, and that the drove which rushed down a steep placewas packed by a competitor. You've got to know your goods from A toIzzard, from snout to tail, on the hoof and in the can. You've got toknow 'em like a young mother knows baby talk, and to be as proud of 'emas the young father of a twelve-pound boy, without really thinking thatyou're stretching it four pounds. You've got to believe in yourself andmake your buyers take stock in you at par and accrued interest. You'vegot to have the scent of a bloodhound for an order, and the grip of abulldog on a customer. You've got to feel the same personal solicitudeover a bill of goods that strays off to a competitor as a parson over abackslider, 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 togo to bed with satisfaction. You've got to eat hog, think hog, dreamhog--in short, go the whole hog if you're going to win out in thepork-packing business. 

That's a pretty liberal receipt, I know, but it's intended for a fellowwho wants to make a good-sized pie. And the only thing you ever find inpastry that you don't put in yourself is flies. 

You have had a wide-open chance during the last few months to pick up agood deal about the practical end of the business, and between tripsnow you ought to spend every spare minute in the packing-house gettingposted. Nothing earns better interest than judicious questions, and theman who invests in more knowledge of the business than he has to have inorder to hold his job has capital with which to buy a mortgage on abetter one. 

I may be mistaken, but I am just a little afraid that you really did notget beyond a bowing acquaintance with Mr. Porker when you were here atthe packing-house. Of course, there isn't anything particularly prettyabout a hog, but any animal which has its kindly disposition andbenevolent inclination to yield up a handsome margin of profit to thosewho 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 isuseless, but it has been my experience that when a fellow has that halfknowledge he finds it's the other half which would really come inhandy. So, when a man's in the selling end of the business what hereally needs to know is the manufacturing end; and when he's in thefactory he can't know too much about the trade. 

You're just about due now to run into a smart Aleck buyer who'll showyou a sample of lard which he'll say was made by a competitor, and askwhat you think the grand jury ought to do to a house which had the nerveto label it "leaf. " Of course, you will nose around it and look wise andsay that, while you hesitate to criticize, you are afraid it would smelllike 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 getin on the laugh, and when he has wiped away the tears he will tell youthat it is your own lard, and prove it to you. Of course, there won't beanything really the matter with it, and if you had been properly postedyou 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 blamedsight better lard than I thought Muggins & Co. Were making. " And you'dhave driven a spike right through that fellow's little joke and havenailed 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 ameat-ax for the other fellow. That is why you want to be on the lookoutall the time for information about the business, and to nail a fact justas 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 hemisses the first opening he will lose a good deal of blood before hegets the second. 

[Illustration: "_Josh Jenkinson would eat a little food now and thenjust to be sociable, but what he really lived on was tobacco. _"]

Speaking of finishing up a subject as you go along naturally calls tomind the case of Josh Jenkinson, back in my home town. As I firstremember Josh, he was just bone and by-products. Wasn't an ounce of realmeat on him. In fact, he was so blamed thin that when he bought anoutfit of clothes his wife used to make them over into two suits forhim. Josh would eat a little food now and then, just to be sociable, butwhat he really lived on was tobacco. Usually kept a chew in one cheekand a cob pipe in the other. He was a powerful hand for a joke and hadone of those porous heads and movable scalps which go with a sense ofhumor in a small village. Used to scare us boys by drawing in on hispipe and letting the smoke sort of leak out through his eyes and earsand nose. Pretended that he was the devil and that he was on fireinside. 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'tany evasions or generalities or metaphors in his religion. The lowerlayers of the hereafter weren't Hades or Gehenna with him, but justplain Hell, and mighty hot, too, you bet. His creed was built of sheetiron and bolted together with inch rivets. He kept the fire going underthe boiler night and day, and he was so blamed busy stoking it that hedidn't have much time to map out the golden streets. When he blew off itwas super-heated steam and you could see the sinners who were in rangefairly sizzle and parboil and shrivel up. There was no give in Doc; nocompromises with creditors; no fire sales. He wasn't one of those elderswho 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 uppenny-ante at the Dutchman's; or wink at his smoking if he'd quitwhisky. 

Josh knew this, so he kept away from the camp-meeting, though the Eldergunned for him pretty steady for a matter of five years. But one summerwhen the meetings were extra interesting, it got so lonesome sittingaround with the whole town off in the woods that Josh sneaked out to theedge of the camp and hid behind some bushes where he could hear what wasgoing on. The elder was carrying about two hundred and fifty pounds, bythe gauge, that day, and with that pressure he naturally traveled intothe sinners pretty fast. The first thing Josh knew he was out from undercover and a-hallelujahing down between the seats to the mourners' bench. When the elder saw what was coming he turned on the forced draft. Insideof ten minutes he had Josh under conviction and had taken his pipe andplug away from him. 

I am just a little inclined to think that Josh would have backslid if hehadn't been a practical joker, and a critter of that breed is about asafraid of a laugh on himself as a raw colt of a steam roller. So hestuck it out, and began to take an interest in meal time. Kicked becauseit didn't come eight or ten times a day. The first thing he knew he hadfatted up till he filled out his half suit and had to put it away incamphor. Then he bought a whole suit, living-skeleton size. In two weekshe 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 alittle 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 thetime retiring new suits, until his wife had fourteen of them laid awayin the chest. 

Said it didn't worry him; that he was bound to lose flesh sooner orlater. That he would catch them on the way down, and wear them out oneat a time. But when he got up to three hundred and fifty pounds he juststuck. Tried exercise and dieting and foreign waters, but he couldn'tbudge an ounce. In the end he had to give the clothes to the WidowDoolan, who had fourteen sons in assorted sizes. 

I simply mention Josh in passing as an example of the fact that a fellowcan't bank on getting a chance to go back and take up a thing that hehas passed over once, and to call your attention to the fact that a manwho knows his own business thoroughly will find an opportunity sooner orlater of reaching the most hardened cuss of a buyer on his route and ofgetting a share of his. 

I want to caution you right here against learning all there is to knowabout pork-packing too quick. Business is a good deal like a nigger'swool--it doesn't look very deep, but there are a heap of kinks andcurves in it. 

When I was a boy and the fellow in pink tights came into the ring, Iused to think he was doing all that could be reasonably expected when hekept eight or ten glass balls going in the air at once. But thebeautiful lady in the blue tights would keep right on handing himthings--kerosene lamps and carving knives and miscellaneous cutlery andcrockery, and he would get them going, too, without losing his happysmile. The great trouble with most young fellows is that they thinkthey have learned all they need to know and have given the audience itsmoney's worth when they can keep the glass balls going, and so they balkat the kerosene lamps and the rest of the implements of lighthousekeeping. But there's no real limit to the amount of extras a fellowwith 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 arerunning yourself full time and overtime, stocking up your brain so thatwhen the demand comes you will have the goods to offer. So far, youpromise to make a fair to ordinary salesman among our retail trade. Iwant to see you grow into a car-lot man--so strong and big that you willforce us to see that you are out of place among the little fellows. Buckup!

 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 atrifle when he's first hitched up to the break wagon, and I'm always alittle suspicious of a critter that stands too quiet under the whip. Iknow it's not meekness, but meanness, that I've got to fight, and it'shard to tell which is the worst. 

The only animal which the Bible calls patient is an ass, and that's bothgood doctrine and good natural history. For I had to make considerableof a study of the Missouri mule when I was a boy, and I discovered thathe's not really patient, but that he only pretends to be. You can cusshim 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 circuszebra, and if you're cautious and reserved in his company he will justlook grieved and pained and resigned. But all the time that mule will begetting meaner and meaner inside, adding compound cussedness everythirty days, and practicing drop kicks in his stall after dark. 

Of course, nothing in this world is wholly bad, not even a mule, for heis half horse. But my observation has taught me that the horse half ofhim is the front half, and that the only really safe way to drive him ishind-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 toturn in at every gate where there seems to be a little shade, andsulking and balking whenever you say "git-ap" to them. They are the menwho are always howling that Bill Smith was promoted because he had apull, and that they are being held down because the manager is jealousof them. I've seen a good many pulls in my time, but I never saw onestrong enough to lift a man any higher than he could raise himself byhis boot straps, or long enough to reach through the cashier's windowfor more money than its owner earned. 

When a fellow brags that he has a pull, he's a liar or his employer's afool. 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 anice, soft spot, stretches out flat on his back, and yells that someheartless 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 bullterrier after him. When he's thrown to the dog from the second-storywindow, he fixes while he's sailing through the air to land right, andwhen the dog jumps for the spot where he hits, he isn't there, but inthe top of the tree across the street. He's a good deal like the littlered-headed cuss that we saw in the football game you took me to. Everytime the herd stampeded it would start in to trample and paw and gorehim. One minute the whole bunch would be on top of him and the next hewould be loping off down the range, spitting out hair and pieces ofcanvas jacket, or standing on one side as cool as a hog on ice, watchingthe mess unsnarl and the removal of the cripples. 

I didn't understand football, but I understood that little sawed-off. Heknew his business. And when a fellow knows his business, he doesn't haveto explain to people that he does. It isn't what a man knows, but whathe thinks he knows that he brags about. Big talk means little knowledge. 

There's a vast difference between having a carload of miscellaneousfacts sloshing around loose in your head and getting all mixed up intransit, and carrying the same assortment properly boxed and crated forconvenient handling and immediate delivery. A ham never weighs so muchas when it's half cured. When it has soaked in all the pickle that itcan, it has to sweat out most of it in the smoke-house before it is anyreal 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 tothe house. If there's anything worse than knowing too little, it'sknowing too much. Education will broaden a narrow mind, but there's noknown cure for a big head. The best you can hope is that it will swellup and bust; and then, of course, there's nothing left. Poverty neverspoils a good man, but prosperity often does. It's easy to stand hardtimes, because that's the only thing you can do, but in good times thefool-killer has to do night work. 

I simply mention these things in a general way. A good many of themdon'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 seean angel instead of what they're trying to look at. There's nothing thattells 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 knewall that you'll have to learn before you'll be a big, broad-gaugedmerchant, you might have something to be sulky about. 

When you've posted yourself properly about the business you'll havetaken a step in the right direction--you will be able to get yourbuyer's attention. All the other steps are those which lead you into hisconfidence. 

Right here you will discover that you are in the fix of the young fellowwho married his best girl and took her home to live with his mother. Hefound that the only way in which he could make one happy was by makingthe other mad, and that when he tried to make them both happy he onlysucceeded in making them both mad. Naturally, in the end, his wifedivorced him and his mother disinherited him, and left her money to anorphan asylum, because, as she sensibly observed in the codicil, "orphans can not be ungrateful to their parents. " But if the man had hada little tact he would have kept them in separate houses, and have leteach one think that she was getting a trifle the best of it, withoutreally giving it to either. 

Tact is the knack of keeping quiet at the right time; of being soagreeable yourself that no one can be disagreeable to you; of makinginferiority feel like equality. A tactful man can pull the stinger froma bee without getting stung. 

Some men deal in facts, and call Bill Jones a liar. They get knockeddown. Some men deal in subterfuges, and say that Bill Jones' father wasa kettle-rendered liar, and that his mother's maiden name was Sapphira, and that any one who believes in the Darwinian theory should pityrather than blame their son. They get disliked. But your tactful mansays that since Baron Munchausen no one has been so chuck full of bullyreminiscences as Bill Jones; and when that comes back to Bill he is halftickled to death, because he doesn't know that the higher criticism hashurt 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 exceptyourself, and that is what you think of Bill Jones. Of course, where youfeel a man is not square you will be armed to meet him, but never on hisown ground. Make him be honest with you if you can, but don't let himmake you dishonest with him. 

When you make a mistake, don't make the second one--keeping it toyourself. Own up. The time to sort out rotten eggs is at the nest. Thedeeper you hide them in the case the longer they stay in circulation, and the worse impression they make when they finally come to thebreakfast-table. A mistake sprouts a lie when you cover it up. And onelie breeds enough distrust to choke out the prettiest crop of confidencethat a fellow ever cultivated. 

Of course, it's easy to have the confidence of the house, or theconfidence of the buyer, but you've got to have both. The house pays youyour salary, and the buyer helps you earn it. If you skin the buyer youwill lose your trade; and if you play tag with the house you will loseyour job. You've simply got to walk the fence straight, for if you stepto either side you'll find a good deal of air under you. 

Even after you are able to command the attention and the confidence ofyour buyers, you've got to be up and dressed all day to hold what tradeis yours, and twisting and turning all night to wriggle into some ofthe 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 forceit, 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 toour town "fresh from his healing triumphs at the Courts of Europe, " ashis handbills ran, "not to make money, but to confer on sufferingmankind the priceless boon of health; to make the sick well, and thewell better. "

Munsterberg wasn't one of your common, coarse, county-fair barkers. Hewas a pretty high-toned article. Had nice, curly black hair and didn'tspare the bear's grease. Wore a silk hat and a Prince Albert coat allthe time, except when he was orating, and then he shed the coat to getfreer action with his arms. And when he talked he used the wholelanguage, you bet. 

[Illustration: "_Herr Doctor Paracelsus Von Munsterberg was a prettyhigh-toned article. _"]

Of course, the Priceless Boon was put up in bottles, labeledMunsterberg's Miraculous Medical Discovery, and, simply to introduce it, he was willing to sell the small size at fifty cents and the large oneat a dollar. In addition to being a philanthropist the Doctor was quitea hand at card tricks, played the banjo, sung coon songs and imitated asaw going through a board very creditably. All these accomplishments, and the story of how he cured the Emperor of Austria's sister with asingle bottle, drew a crowd, but they didn't sell a drop of theDiscovery. Nobody in town was really sick, and those who thought theywere had stocked up the week before with Quackenboss' Quick Quinine Kurefrom a fellow that made just as liberal promises as Munsterberg and soldthe large size at fifty cents, including a handsome reproduction of anold master for the parlor. 

Some fellows would just have cussed a little and have moved on to thenext town, but Munsterberg made a beautiful speech, praising theclimate, and saying that in his humble capacity he had been privilegedto meet the strength and beauty of many Courts, but never had he been inany place where strength was stronger or beauty beautifuller than righthere in Hoskins' Corners. He prayed with all his heart, though it wasalmost too much to hope, that the cholera, which was raging in Kentucky, would pass this Eden by; that the yellow fever, which was devastatingTennessee, would halt abashed before this stronghold of health, thoughhe felt bound to add that it was a peculiarly malignant and persistentdisease; that the smallpox, which was creeping southward from Canada, would smite the next town instead of ours, though he must own that itwas no respecter of persons; that the diphtheria and scarlet-fever, which were sweeping over New England and crowding the graveyards, couldbe kept from crossing the Hudson, though they were great travelers andit was well to be prepared for the worst; that we one and all mightprovidentially escape chills, headaches, coated tongue, pains in theback, loss of sleep and that tired feeling, but it was almost too muchto ask, even of such a generous climate. In any event, he begged us tobeware of worthless nostrums and base imitations. It made him sad tothink that to-day we were here and that to-morrow we were running up anundertaker's bill, all for the lack of a small bottle of Medicine'sgreatest gift to Man. 

I could see that this speech made a lot of women in the crowd powerfuluneasy, and I heard the Widow Judkins say that she was afraid it wasgoing to be "a mighty sickly winter, " and she didn't know as it would doany harm to have some of that stuff in the house. But the Doctor didn'toffer the Priceless Boon for sale again. He went right from his speechinto an imitation of a dog, with a tin can tied to his tail, runningdown Main Street and crawling under Si Hooper's store at the far end ofit--an imitation, he told us, to which the Sultan was powerful partial, "him being a cruel man and delighting in torturing the poor dumb beastswhich the Lord has given us to love, honor and cherish. "

He kept this sort of thing up till he judged it was our bedtime, andthen he thanked us "one and all for our kind attention, " and said thatas his mission in life was to amuse as well as to heal, he would stayover till the next afternoon and give a special matinée for the littleones, whom he loved for the sake of his own golden-haired Willie, backthere 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 theDoctor just made us roar for half an hour. Then, while he was singing anuncommon 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 pushedJohnny, yelling all the time, up to the Doctor, who began tapping him onthe back and looking down his throat. Naturally, this made Johnny cryall the harder, and his mother was beginning to explain that she"reckoned she must have stepped on his sore toe, " when the Doctor struckhis forehead, cried "Eureka!", whipped out a bottle of the PricelessBoon, and forced a spoonful of it into Johnny's mouth. Then he gave theboy three slaps on the back and three taps on the stomach, ran one handalong his windpipe, and took a small button-hook out of his mouth withthe other. 

Johnny made all his previous attempts at yelling sound like an imitationwhen he saw this, and he broke away and ran toward home. Then the Doctorstuck one hand in over the top of his vest, waved the button-hook inthe other, and cried: "Woman, your child is cured! Your button-hook isfound!"

Then he went on to explain that when baby swallowed safety-pins, orpennies, or fish-bones, or button-hooks, or any little householdarticles, that all you had to do was to give it a spoonful of thePriceless Boon, tap it gently fore and aft, hold your hand under itsmouth, and the little article would drop out like chocolate from a slotmachine. 

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 followedJohnny home. Half an hour later the Doctor drove out of the Corners, leaving his stock of the Priceless Boon distributed--for the usualconsideration--among all the mothers in town. 

It was not until the next day that Mrs. Brown got a chance to explainthat while the Boon might be all that the Doctor claimed for it, no onein her house had ever owned a button-hook, because her old man worejack-boots and she wore congress shoes, and little Johnny wore justplain feet. 

I simply mention the Doctor in passing, not as an example in morals, butin methods. Some salesmen think that selling is like eating--to satisfyan existing appetite; but a good salesman is like a good cook--he cancreate an appetite when the buyer isn't hungry. 

I don't care how good old methods are, new ones are better, even ifthey're only just as good. That's not so Irish as it sounds. Doing thesame thing in the same way year after year is like eating a quail a dayfor thirty days. Along toward the middle of the month a fellow begins tolong 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 fromold Shorter is the kind of back talk I like. We can stand a little moreof the same sort of sassing. I have told the cashier that you will drawthirty a week after this, and I want you to have a nice suit of clothesmade and send the bill to the old man. Get something that won't keeppeople guessing whether you follow the horses or do buck and wing dancingfor a living. Your taste in clothes seems to be lasting longer than therest of your college education. You looked like a young widow who hadraised the second crop of daisies over the deceased when you were in herelast week. 

Of course, clothes don't make the man, but they make all of him excepthis hands and face during business hours, and that's a prettyconsiderable area of the human animal. A dirty shirt may hide a pureheart, but it seldom covers a clean skin. If you look as if you hadslept in your clothes, most men will jump to the conclusion that youhave, and you will never get to know them well enough to explain thatyour head is so full of noble thoughts that you haven't time to botherwith the dandruff on your shoulders. And if you wear blue and whitestriped pants and a red necktie, you will find it difficult to get closeenough to a deacon to be invited to say grace at his table, even if younever play for anything except coffee or beans. 

Appearances are deceitful, I know, but so long as they are, there'snothing like having them deceive for us instead of against us. I've seena ten-cent shave and a five-cent shine get a thousand-dollar job, and acigarette and a pint of champagne knock the bottom out of amillion-dollar pork corner. Four or five years ago little Jim Jacksonhad the bears in the provision pit hibernating and living on their ownfat till one morning, the day after he had run the price of mess pork upto twenty dollars and nailed it there, some one saw him drinking a smallbottle just before he went on 'Change, and told it round among thebrokers on the floor. The bears thought Jim must have had bad news, tobe bracing up at that time in the morning, so they perked up andeverlastingly sold the mess pork market down through the bottom of thepit to solid earth. There wasn't even a grease spot left of that cornerwhen they got through. As it happened, Jim hadn't had any bad news; hejust took the drink because he felt pretty good, and things were cominghis way. 

But it isn't enough to be all right in this world; you've got to lookall right as well, because two-thirds of success is making people thinkyou are all right. So you have to be governed by general rules, eventhough you may be an exception. People have seen four and four makeeight, and the young man and the small bottle make a damned fool sooften that they are hard to convince that the combination can work outany other way. The Lord only allows so much fun for every man that Hemakes. Some get it going fishing most of the time and making money therest; some get it making money most of the time and going fishing therest. 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'vegot to walk. 

I used to get a heap of solid comfort out of chewing tobacco. Picked upthe habit in Missouri, and took to it like a Yankee to pie. At that timepretty much every one in those parts chewed, except the Elder and thewomen, and most of them snuffed. Seemed a nice, sociable habit, and Inever thought anything special about it till I came North and your Mabegan to tell me it was a vile relic of barbarism, meaning Missouri, Isuppose. Then I confined operations to my office and took to fine cutinstead of plug, as being tonier. 

Well, one day, about ten years ago, when I was walking through theoffice, I noticed one of the boys on the mailing-desk, a mightylikely-looking youngster, sort of working his jaws as he wrote. I didn'tstop to think, but somehow I was mad in a minute. Still, I didn't say aword--just stood and looked at him while he speeded up the way the boyswill when they think the old man is nosing around to see whose salary hecan raise next. 

I stood over him for a matter of five minutes, and all the time he waspretending not to see me at all. I will say that he was a pretty gameboy, for he never weakened for a second. But at last, seeing he wasabout 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 Igot out a word, something hit me all of a sudden, and I just went up tothe 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 quitbreathing if I had asked him to, I reckon. And I had to take my stock offine cut and send it to the heathen. 

I simply mention this little incident in passing as an example of thefact that a man can't do what he pleases in this world, because thehigher he climbs the plainer people can see him. Naturally, as the oldman's son, you have a lot of fellows watching you and betting that youare no good. If you succeed they will say it was an accident; and if youfail 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 thosewho 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 arereally thinking animals. Where one fellow reads a stranger's characterin his face, a hundred read it in his get-up. We have shown a dozenbreeds of dukes and droves of college presidents and doctors of divinitythrough the packing-house, and the workmen never noticed them except tothrow livers at them when they got in their way. But when John L. Sullivan went through the stock yards it just simply shut down theplant. 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 menthat he was the real thing in prize-fighters. Of course, when a fellowgets to the point where he is something in particular, he doesn't haveto care because he doesn't look like anything special; but while a youngfellow isn't anything in particular, it is a mighty valuable asset if helooks like something special. 

Just here I want to say that while it's all right for the other fellowto 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 theother fellow does the same. A suspicious man makes trouble for himself, but a cautious one saves it. Because there ain't any rotten apples inthe top layer, it ain't always safe to bet that the whole barrel issound. 

[Illustration: "_When John L. Sullivan went through the stock yards, itjust simply shut down the plant. _"]

A man doesn't snap up a horse just because he looks all right. As ausual thing that only makes him wonder what really is the matter thatthe other fellow wants to sell. So he leads the nag out into the middleof a ten-acre lot, where the light will strike him good and strong, andexamines 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 thegrand hailing sign of distress; and he peeks down his throat for darksecrets. If the horse passes this degree the buyer drives him twenty orthirty miles, expecting him to turn out a roarer, or to find that hebalks, or shies, or goes lame, or develops some other horse nonsense. If after all that there are no bad symptoms, he offers fifty less thanthe price asked, on general principles, and for fear he has missedsomething. 

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 bindyourself to travel very far with him. 

I remember giving a nice-looking, clean-shaven fellow a job on thebilling-desk, just on his looks, but he turned out such a poor hand atfigures that I had to fire him at the end of a week. It seemed that themorning he struck me for the place he had pawned his razor for fifteencents in order to get a shave. Naturally, if I had known that in thefirst 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. Alwayshandled himself just right when he talked to you and kept himselflooking right up to the mark. His salary wasn't very big, but he hadsuch a persuasive way that he seemed to get a dollar and a half's worthof value out of every dollar that he earned. Never crowded the fashionsand never gave 'em any slack. If sashes were the thing with summershirts, why Charlie had a sash, you bet, and when tight trousers werethe nobby trick in pants, Charlie wore his double reefed. Take him foreand 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 comingin from his route looking glum; so I handed him fifty dollars as alittle sweetener. I never saw a fifty cheer a man up like that one didCharlie, and he thanked me just right--didn't stutter and didn't slopover. 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 Ididn't look around again till on toward closing time. Then, rightoutside 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 thesame. 

"I had a plain-clothes man here to arrest him this evening, but hedidn'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 thismorning, because he tried to overdraw his salary account and I wouldn'tlet him, and he didn't collect any bills to-day because he had alreadycollected everything that was due this week and lost it bucking thetiger. "

I didn't say anything, but I suspected that there was a sucker somewherein the office. The next day I was sure of it, for I got a telegram fromthe 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 justten 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 eighthundred and fifty dollars, and I pass it along to you because it maysave 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 grainand provision brokers, at luncheon yesterday, and while we were talkingover the light run of hogs your name came up somehow, and he congratulatedme on having such a smart son. Like an old fool, I allowed that you werebright enough to come in out of the rain if somebody called you, though Iought to have known better, for it seems as if I never start in to bragabout your being sound and sweet that I don't have to wind up by allowinga rebate for skippers. 

Horshey was so blamed anxious to show that you were over-weight--hewants to handle some of my business on 'Change--that he managed to proveyou a light-weight. Told me you had ordered him to sell a hundredthousand ribs short last week, and that he had just bought them in on awire from you at a profit of four hundred and sixty-odd dollars. I wasmighty hot, you bet, to know that you had been speculating, but I had toswallow and allow that you were a pretty sharp boy. I told Horshey toclose out the account and send me a check for your profits and I wouldforward it, as I wanted to give you a tip on the market before you didany more trading. 

I inclose the check herewith. Please indorse it over to the treasurer ofThe Home for Half Orphans and return at once. I will see that he gets itwith your compliments. 

Now, I want to give you that tip on the market. There are severalreasons why it isn't safe for you to trade on 'Change just now, but theparticular one is that Graham & Co. Will fire you if you do. Trading onmargin is a good deal like paddling around the edge of the old swimminghole--it seems safe and easy at first, but before a fellow knows it hehas stepped off the edge into deep water. The wheat pit is only thirtyfeet across, but it reaches clear down to Hell. And trading on marginmeans trading on the ragged edge of nothing. When a man buys, he'sbuying 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 experiencethat the net profit on nothing is nit. When a speculator wins he don'tstop 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 ittakes a bull only thirty seconds to lose his hide; and if you'll believeme 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 duringthe long winter months. 

Because you are the son of a pork packer you may think that you know alittle more than the next fellow about paper pork. There's nothing init. The poorest men on earth are the relations of millionaires. When Isell futures on 'Change, they're against hogs that are traveling intodry salt at the rate of one a second, and if the market goes up on meI've got the solid meat to deliver. But, if you lose, the only part ofthe hog which you can deliver is the squeal. 

I wouldn't bear down so hard on this matter if money was the only thingthat a fellow could lose on 'Change. But if a clerk sells pork, and themarket goes down, he's mighty apt to get a lot of ideas with holes inthem and bad habits as the small change of his profits. And if themarket goes up, he's likely to go short his self-respect to win back hismoney. 

Most men think that they can figure up all their assets in dollars andcents, 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 astraight backbone and a clear eye his creditors don't have to lie awakenights worrying over his liabilities. You can hide your meanness fromyour brain and your tongue, but the eye and the backbone won't keepsecrets. 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 ofdust over a harmless little flyer. But I've kept a heap smarter boysthan you out of Joliet when they found it easy to feed the Board ofTrade hog out of my cash drawer, after it had sucked up their savings ina 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 itpulls in ten for you it's likely working out West and you've got towatch to see that it doesn't buck; when it makes twenty you own a blamegood critter or a mighty foolish one, and you want to make dead surewhich; but if it draws a hundred it's playing the races or somethingjust as hard on horses and dollars, and the first thing you know youwon't have even a carcass to haul to the glue factory. 

I dwell a little on this matter of speculation because you've got tolive next door to the Board of Trade all your life, and it's a safething to know something about a neighbor's dogs before you try to patthem. Sure Things, Straight Tips and Dead Cinches will come running outto meet you, wagging their tails and looking as innocent as if theyhadn't just killed a lamb, but they'll bite. The only safe road tofollow in speculation leads straight away from the Board of Trade onthe dead run. 

Speaking of sure things naturally calls to mind the case of my oldfriend Deacon Wiggleford, whom I used to know back in Missouri yearsago. The Deacon was a powerful pious man, and he was good according tohis lights, but he didn't use a very superior article of kerosene tokeep them burning. 

Used to take up half the time in prayer-meeting talking about how wewere all weak vessels and stewards. But he was so blamed busy exhortingothers to give out of the fullness with which the Lord had blessed themthat he sort of forgot that the Lord had blessed him about fiftythousand 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 theDeacon, he was not only engaged in a mighty sinful occupation, but hewas a mighty poor steward of his sinful gains. Smoked two-bit cigarsand wore a plug hat. Drank a little and cussed a little and went to theEpiscopal Church, though he had been raised a Methodist. Altogether itlooked as if Bill was a pretty hard nut. 

Well, one fall the Deacon decided to go to Chicago himself to buy hiswinter 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 hisopinion, he wasn't much better than a faro dealer, for he used to bragthat he never let anything turn him from his duty, which meant hismeddling in other people's business. I want to say right here that withmost men duty means something unpleasant which the other fellow ought todo. 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 workwhich one man can give to run one man right, and if a fellow's puttingin five or six hours a day on his neighbor's character, he's mighty aptto scamp the building of his own. 

Well, when Brother Bill got home from business that first night, theDeacon explained that every time he lit a two-bit cigar he wasdepriving a Zulu of twenty-five helpful little tracts which might havemade a better man of him; that fast horses were a snare and plug hats awile of the Enemy; that the Board of Trade was the Temple of Belial andthe brokers on it his sons and servants. 

Brother Bill listened mighty patiently to him, and when the Deacon hadpumped out all the Scripture that was in him, and was beginning to suckair, he sort of slunk into the conversation like a setter pup that'sbeen caught with the feathers on its chops. 

"Brother Zeke, " says he, "I shall certainly let your words soak in. Iwant to be a number two red, hard, sound and clean sort of a man, andgrade contract on delivery day. Perhaps, as you say, the rust has gotinto me and the Inspector won't pass me, and if I can see it that wayI'll settle my trades and get out of the market for good. "

The Deacon knew that Brother Bill had scraped together considerableproperty, and, as he was a bachelor, it would come to him in case thebroker was removed by any sudden dispensation. What he really feared wasthat this money might be fooled away in high living and speculation. Andso he had banged away into the middle of the flock, hoping to bring downthose two birds. Now that it began to look as if he might kill off thewhole bunch he started in to hedge. 

"Is it safe, William?" says he. 

"As Sunday-school, " says Bill, "if you do a strictly brokerage businessand don't speculate. "

"I trust, William, that you recognize the responsibilities of yourstewardship?"

[Illustration: "_I started in to curl up that young fellow to acrisp. _"]

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. Ihadn't bought or sold a bushel on my own account in a year till lastweek, when I got your letter saying that you were coming. Then I sawwhat looked like a safe chance to scalp the market for a couple of centsa bushel, and I bought 10, 000 September, intending to turn over theprofits to you as a little present, so that you could see the town andhave a good time without it's costing you anything. "

The Deacon judged from Bill's expression that he had got nipped and wasgoing to try to unload the loss on him, so he changed his face to theone which he used when attending the funeral of any one who hadn't beena professor, and came back quick and hard:

"I'm surprised, William, that you should think I would accept money madein 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, " andBill hove another sigh. 

"Made two hundred dollars!" echoed the Deacon, and he changed his faceagain for the one which he used when he found a lead quarter in histill 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 seethings in a new light. Of course, after what you've said, I know itwould be an insult to offer you the money. And I feel now that itwouldn't be right to keep it myself. I must sleep on it and try to findthe straight thing to do. "

I guess it really didn't interfere with Bill's sleep, but the Deacon satup with the corpse of that two hundred dollars, you bet. In the morningat breakfast he asked Brother Bill to explain all about this speculatingbusiness, what made the market go up and down, and whether real corn orwheat or pork figured in any stage of a deal. Bill looked sort of sadand dreamy-eyed, as if his conscience hadn't digested that two hundredyet, but he was mighty obliging about explaining everything to Zeke. Hehad changed his face for the one which he wore when he sold an easycustomer ground peas and chicory for O. G. Java, and every now and thenhe gulped as if he was going to start a hymn. When Bill told him howgood and bad weather sent the market up and down, he nodded and saidthat 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, notto any marked extent; it's from the weather man or some liar in the cornbelt, and, as the weather man usually guesses wrong, I reckon thereisn't any special inspiration about it. The game is to guess what'sgoing to happen, not what has happened, and by the time the real weathercomes along everybody has guessed wrong and knocked the market off acent or two. "

That made the Deacon's chin whiskers droop a little, but he began to askquestions again, and by and by he discovered that away behind--about ahundred miles behind, but that was close enough for the Deacon--a dealin futures there were real wheat and pork. Said then that he'd beenmisinformed and misled; that speculation was a legitimate business, involving skill and sagacity; that his last scruple was removed, andthat he would accept the two hundred. 

Bill brightened right up at that and thanked him for putting it so clearand removing the doubts that had been worrying him. Said that he couldspeculate with a clear conscience after listening to the Deacon's ableexposition of the subject. Was only sorry he hadn't seen him to talk itover before breakfast, as the two hundred had been lying so heavy on hismind all night that he'd got up early and mailed a check for it to theDeacon'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 theelder, but old Doc. Hoover was a pretty quick stepper himself and he'dblown the whole two hundred as soon as he got it, buying winter coal forpoor people. 

I simply mention the Deacon in passing as an example of the fact thatit's easy for a man who thinks he's all right to go all wrong when hesees a couple of hundred dollars lying around loose a little to one sideof the straight and narrow path; and that when he reaches down to pickup the money there's usually a string tied to it and a small boy in thebushes 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 havetheir legitimate uses, but all you need to know just now is thatspeculation by a fellow who never owns more pork at a time than he seeson his breakfast plate isn't one of them. When you become a packer youmay go on 'Change as a trader; until then you can go there only as asucker. 

 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 musthave the black bass in those parts pretty well terrorized. I never couldquite figure it out, but there seems to be something about a fish thatmakes even a cold-water deacon see double. I reckon it must be thatwhile Eve was learning the first principles of dressmaking from thesnake, Adam was off bass fishing and keeping his end up by learning howto lie. 

Don't overstock yourself with those four-pound fish yarns, though, because the boys have been bringing them back from their vacations tillwe've got enough to last us for a year of Fridays. And if you're sendingthem to keep in practice, you might as well quit, because we've decidedto take you off the road when you come back, and make you assistantmanager of the lard department. The salary will be fifty dollars aweek, and the duties of the position to do your work so well that themanager can't run the department without you, and that you can run thedepartment without the manager. 

To do this you will have to know lard; to know yourself; and to knowthose under you. To some fellows lard is just hog fat, and not alwaysthat, if they would rather make a dollar to-day than five to-morrow. Butit was a good deal more to Jack Summers, who held your new job until wehad to promote him to canned goods. 

Jack knew lard from the hog to the frying pan; was up on lard in historyand religion; originated what he called the "Ham and" theory, provingthat Moses' injunction against pork must have been dissolved by theCircuit Court, because Noah included a couple of shoats in his cargo, and called one of his sons Ham, out of gratitude, probably, aftertasting a slice broiled for the first time; argued that all the greatnations lived on fried food, and that America was the greatest of themall, owing to the energy-producing qualities of pie, liberally shortenedwith lard. 

It almost broke Jack's heart when we decided to manufacture our newcottonseed oil product, Seedoiline. But on reflection he saw that itjust gave him an extra hold on the heathen that he couldn't convert tolard, and he started right out for the Hebrew and vegetarian vote. Jackhad enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is the best shortening for any job; itmakes heavy work light. 

A good many young fellows envy their boss because they think he makes therules and can do as he pleases. As a matter of fact, he's the only man inthe shop who can't. He's like the fellow on the tight-rope--there's plentyof scenery under him and lots of room around him, but he's got to keep hisfeet on the wire all the time and travel straight ahead. 

A clerk has just one boss to answer to--the manager. But the manager hasjust as many bosses as he has clerks under him. He can make rules, buthe's the only man who can't afford to break them now and then. A fellowis a boss simply because he's a better man than those under him, andthere'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'tgive them. If his rules are too hard for him to mind, you can bet theyare too hard for the clerks who don't get half so much for minding themas he does. There's no alarm clock for the sleepy man like an earlyrising manager; and there's nothing breeds work in an office like a busyboss. 

Of course, setting a good example is just a small part of a manager'sduties. It's not enough to settle yourself firm on the box seat--youmust have every man under you hitched up right and well in hand. Youcan't work individuals by general rules. Every man is a special case andneeds a special pill. 

When you fix up a snug little nest for a Plymouth Rock hen and encourageher with a nice porcelain egg, it doesn't always follow that she hasreached the fricassee age because she doesn't lay right off. Sometimesshe 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 thelash always leaves its worst soreness under the skin. A hundred men willforgive 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'tbelieve you. But if you can start him on the road that will lead him tothe truth he's mighty apt to try to reform himself before any one elsefinds him out. 

Consider carefully before you say a hard word to a man, but never let achance to say a good one go by. Praise judiciously bestowed is moneyinvested. 

Never learn anything about your men except from themselves. A goodmanager needs no detectives, and the fellow who can't read human naturecan't manage it. The phonograph records of a fellow's character arelined 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 incompatibilityof temper and curl-papers is before the marriage ceremony. But when youfind that you've hired the wrong man, you can't get rid of him tooquick. Pay him an extra month, but don't let him stay another day. Adischarged clerk in the office is like a splinter in the thumb--a centreof soreness. There are no exceptions to this rule, because there are noexceptions to human nature. 

Never threaten, because a threat is a promise to pay that it isn'talways convenient to meet, but if you don't make it good it hurts yourcredit. Save a threat till you're ready to act, and then you won't needit. 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 mountainhe's in a mighty dignified and exalted position, but if he's gazing atthe clouds, he's missing a heap of interesting and important doings downin the valley. Never lose your dignity, of course, but tie it up in allthe red tape you can find around the office, and tuck it away in thesafe. It's easy for a boss to awe his clerks, but a man who is feared tohis face is hated behind his back. A competent boss can move among hismen without having to draw an imaginary line between them, because theywill see the real one if it exists. 

Besides keeping in touch with your office men, you want to feel yoursalesmen all the time. Send each of them a letter every day so thatthey won't forget that we are making goods for which we need orders; andinsist on their sending you a line every day, whether they have anythingto say or not. When a fellow has to write in six times a week to thehouse, he uses up his explanations mighty fast, and he's pretty apt tohustle for business to make his seventh letter interesting. 

Right here I want to repeat that in keeping track of others and theirfaults it's very, very important that you shouldn't lose sight of yourown. Authority swells up some fellows so that they can't see theircorns; but a wise man tries to cure his own while remembering not totread on his neighbors'. 

[Illustration: "_A good many salesmen have an idea that buyers are onlyinterested in funny stories. _"]

In this connection, the story of Lemuel Hostitter, who kept the cornergrocery in my old town, naturally comes to mind. Lem was probably themeanest white man in the State of Missouri, and it wasn't any walk-overto hold the belt in those days. Most grocers were satisfied to adulteratetheir coffee with ground peas, but Lem was so blamed mean that headulterated the peas first. Bought skin-bruised hams and claimed thatthe bruise was his private and particular brand, stamped in the skin, showing that they were a fancy article, packed expressly for his fancyfamily trade. Ran a soda-water fountain in the front of his store withhome-made syrups that ate the lining out of the children's stomachs, anda blind tiger in the back room with moonshine whiskey that pickled theirdaddies' insides. Take it by and large, Lem's character smelled about asvarious 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 cropsand any of the neighbors who didn't happen to be there. As Lem wasalways around, in the end he was the only man in town whose meannesshadn't been talked over in that grocery. Naturally, he began to thinkthat he was the only decent white man in the county. Got to shaking hishead and reckoning that the town was plum rotten. Said that such goingson would make a pessimist of a goat. Wanted to know if public opinioncouldn'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 Lemfetched public opinion all right. One night the local chapter of theW. 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 somean that even the ground couldn't soak it up. The noise brought out themen, and they sort of caught the spirit of the happy occasion. When theywere through, Lem's stock and fixtures looked mighty sick, and they hadLem on a rail headed for the county line. 

I don't know when I've seen a more surprised man than Lem. He couldn'tcuss even. But as he never came back, to ask for any explanation, Ireckon he figured it out that they wanted to get rid of him because hewas too good for the town. 

I simply mention Lem in passing as an example of the fact that whenyou're through sizing up the other fellow, it's a good thing to stepback from yourself and see how you look. Then add fifty per cent. Toyour estimate of your neighbor for virtues that you can't see, anddeduct fifty per cent. From yourself for faults that you've missed inyour 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'dbetter tell him to go into training, because I expect to be strongenough to lick him by the time I get back. Between that ten-day boatwhich he recommended and these Dutch doctors, I'm almost well and aboutbroke. You don't really have to take the baths here to get rid of yourrheumatism--their bills scare it out of a fellow. 

They tell me we had a pretty quiet trip across, and I'm not saying thatwe didn't, because for the first three days I was so busy holding myselfin my berth that I couldn't get a chance to look out the porthole to seefor myself. I reckon there isn't anything alive that can beat me atbeing 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 oldfellows were playing poker in the smoking-room and all the young oneswere lallygagging under the boats--until I found that we were carrying acouple of hundred steers between decks. They looked mighty homesick, youbet, and I reckon they sort of sized me up as being a long ways fromChicago, for we cottoned to each other right from the start. Take 'em asthey ran, they were a mighty likely bunch of steers, and I got a heap ofsolid 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 thisexport cattle business, and have all the facts and figures ready for mewhen I get back. There seems to be a good margin in it, and with ourEnglish house we are fixed up to handle it all right at this end. Itmakes me mighty sick to think that we've been sitting back on ourhindlegs and letting the other fellow run away with this trade. We arepackers, I know, but that's no reason why we can't be shippers, too. Iwant to milk the critter coming and going, twice a day, and milk herdry. Unless you do the whole thing you can't do anything in business asit runs to-day. There's still plenty of room at the top, but there isn'tmuch anywheres else. 

There may be reasons why we haven't been able to tackle this exportingof live cattle, but you can tell our people there that they have got tobe mighty good reasons to wipe out the profit I see in it. Of course, Imay have missed them, for I've only looked into the business a little byway 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 outof your department, the general principle is in it. The way to think ofa thing in business is to think of it first, and the way to get a shareof the trade is to go for all of it. Half the battle's in being on thehilltop first; and the other half's in staying there. In speaking ofthese matters, and in writing you about your new job, I've run a littleahead of your present position, because I'm counting on you to catch upwith me. But you want to get it clearly in mind that I'm writing to younot as the head of the house, but as the head of the family, and that Idon't propose to mix the two things. 

Even as assistant manager of the lard department, you don't occupy avery important position with us yet. But the great trouble with somefellows is that a little success goes to their heads. Instead of hidingtheir 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 ofbig-head will fill an office full of sore heads. 

I don't know any one who has better opportunities for making himselfunpopular than an assistant, for the clerks are apt to cuss him for allthe manager's meanness, and the manager is likely to find fault with himfor all the clerks' cussedness. But if he explains his orders to theclerks he loses his authority, and if he excuses himself to the managerhe loses his usefulness. A manager needs an assistant to take troublefrom him, not to bring it to him. 

The one important thing for you to remember all the time is not toforget. It's easier for a boss to do a thing himself than to tell someone twice to do it. Petty details take up just as much room in amanager's head as big ideas; and the more of the first you store forhim, the more warehouse room you leave him for the second. When a bosshas to spend his days swearing at his assistant and the clerks have tosit up nights hating him, they haven't much time left to swear by thehouse. Satisfaction is the oil of the business machine. 

Some fellows can only see those above them, and others can only seethose under them, but a good man is cross-eyed and can see both ends atonce. An assistant who becomes his manager's right hand is going to findthe left hand helping him; and it's not hard for a clerk to find goodpoints in a boss who finds good ones in him. Pulling from above andboosting from below make climbing easy. 

In handling men, your own feelings are the only ones that are of noimportance. I don't mean by this that you want to sacrifice yourself-respect, but you must keep in mind that the bigger the position thebroader the man must be to fill it. And a diet of courtesy andconsideration gives girth to a boss. 

Of course, all this is going to take so much time and thought that youwon't have a very wide margin left for golf--especially in theafternoons. I simply mention this in passing, because I see in theChicago papers which have been sent me that you were among the playerson 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 theballs--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 wantsto be a boss butcher hasn't much daylight to waste on any kind of linksexcept sausage links. 

Of course, a man should have a certain amount of play, just as a boy isentitled to a piece of pie at the end of his dinner, but he don't wantto make a meal of it. Any one who lets sinkers take the place of breadand meat gets bilious pretty young; and these fellows who haven't anyjob, except to blow the old man's dollars, are a good deal like thelittle niggers in the pie-eating contest at the County Fair--they'vea-plenty of pastry and they're attracting a heap of attention, butthey've got a stomach-ache coming to them by and by. 

I want to caution you right here against getting the society bug in yourhead. I'd sooner you'd smoke these Turkish cigarettes which smell like afire in the fertilizer factory. You're going to meet a good many strayfools in the course of business every day without going out to hunt upthe main herd after dark. 

Everybody over here in Europe thinks that we haven't any society inAmerica, and a power of people in New York think that we haven't anysociety in Chicago. But so far as I can see there are just as manyninety-nine-cent men spending million-dollar incomes in one place asanother; and the rules that govern the game seem to be the same in allthree places--you've got to be a descendant to belong, and the fartheryou descend the harder you belong. The only difference is that, inEurope, the ancestor who made money enough so that his family coulddescend, has been dead so long that they have forgotten his shop; inNew 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 onthe Board of Trade or out at the Stock Yards. I want to say right herethat I don't propose to be an ancestor until after I'm dead. Then, ifyou want to have some fellow whose grandfather sold bad whiskey to theIndians sniff and smell pork when you come into the room, you can suityourself. 

Of course, I may be off in sizing this thing up, because it's a littleout of my line. But it's been my experience that these people who thinkthat they are all the choice cuts off the critter, and that the rest ofus are only fit for sausage, are usually chuck steak when you get themunder the knife. I've tried two or three of them, who had gone broke, inthe office, but when you separate them from their money there's nothingleft, not even their friends. 

I never see a fellow trying to crawl or to buy his way into society thatI don't think of my old friend Hank Smith and his wife Kate--Kate Bottsshe was before he married her--and how they tried to butt their waythrough the upper crust. 

Hank and I were boys together in Missouri, and he stayed along in theold town after I left. I heard of him on and off as tending store alittle, and farming a little, and loafing a good deal. Then I forgot allabout him, until one day a few years ago when he turned up in the papersas Captain Henry Smith, the Klondike Gold King, just back from CircleCity, with a million in dust and anything you please in claims. There'snever any limit to what a miner may be worth in those, except hisimagination. 

I was a little puzzled when, a week later, my office boy brought me acard reading Colonel Henry Augustus Bottes-Smythe, but I supposed it wassome distinguished foreigner who had come to size me up so that he couldround out his roast on Chicago in his new book, and I told the boy toshow the General in. 

I've got a pretty good memory for faces, and I'd bought too much storeplug of Hank in my time not to know him, even with a clean shave and aplug hat. Some men dry up with success, but it was just spouting out ofHank. Told me he'd made his pile and that he was tired of living on theslag 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 toknow what was the use of being a nob if a fellow wasn't the nobbiestsort of a nob. Said he'd bought a house on Beacon Hill, in Boston, andthat if I'd prick up my ears occasionally I'd hear something drop intothe Back Bay. Handed me his new card four times and explained that itwas the rawest sort of dog to carry a brace of names in your cardholster; that it gave you the drop on the swells every time, and thatthey just had to throw up both hands and pass you the pot when youshowed down. Said that Bottes was old English for Botts, and that Smythewas new American for Smith; the Augustus was just a fancy touch, a sortof high-card kicker. 

I didn't explain to Hank, because it was congratulations and notexplanations that he wanted, and I make it a point to show a customerthe line of goods that he's looking for. And I never heard the fullparticulars of his experiences in the East, though, from what I learnedafterward, Hank struck Boston with a bang, all right. 

He located his claim on Beacon Hill, between a Mayflower descendant anda Declaration Signer's great-grandson, breeds which believe that whenthe Lord made them He was through, and that the rest of us justhappened. And he hadn't been in town two hours before he started in tomake improvements. There was a high wrought-iron railing in front of hishouse, and he had that gilded first thing, because, as he said, hewasn't running a receiving vault and he didn't want any mistakes. Thenhe bought a nice, open barouche, had the wheels painted red, hired anigger coachman and started out in style to be sociable and getacquainted. Left his card all the way down one side of Beacon Street, and then drove back leaving it on the other. Everywhere he stopped hefound that the whole family was out. Kept it up a week, on and off, butdidn't seem to have any luck. Thought that the men must be hot sportsand the women great gadders to keep on the jump so much. Allowed thatthey 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 outsomething that he reckoned would round up the whole bunch. 

Hank sent out a thousand invitations to his grand opening, as he calledit; left one at every house within a mile. Had a brass band on the frontsteps and fireworks on the roof. Ordered forty kegs from the breweryand hired a fancy mixer to sling together mild snorts, as he calledthem, for the ladies. They tell me that, when the band got to going goodon the steps and the fireworks on the roof, even Beacon Street lookedout the windows to see what was doing. There must have been ten thousandpeople in the street and not a soul but Hank and his wife and the mixerin the house. Some one yelled speech, and then the whole crowd took itup, till Hank came out on the steps. He shut off the band with one handand stopped the fireworks with the other. Said that speechmaking wasn'this strangle-hold; that he'd been living on snowballs in the Klondikefor so long that his gas-pipe was frozen; but that this welcome startedthe ice and he thought about three fingers of the plumber's favoriteprescription would cut out the frost. Would the crowd join him? He hadinvited a few friends in for the evening, but there seemed to be somemisunderstanding about the date, and he hated to have good stuff curdleon his hands. 

While this was going on, the Mayflower descendant was telephoning forthe 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 wagonsfull of policemen got there. But they had to turn in a riot call andbring out the reserves before they could break up Hank's little Bostontea-party. 

After all, Hank did what he started out to do with his party--rounded upall his neighbors in a bunch, though not exactly according to schedule. For next morning there were so many descendants and great-grandsons inthe police court to prefer charges that it looked like a reunion of thePilgrim Fathers. The Judge fined Hank on sixteen counts and bound himover to keep the peace for a hundred years. That afternoon he left forthe West on a special, because the Limited didn't get there quickenough. But before going he tacked on the front door of his house a signwhich 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 heliked things lively, but there was altogether too much rough-house onBeacon Hill for him. Judged that as the crowd which wasn't invited wasso blamed sociable, the one which was invited would have stayed a weekif it hadn't slipped up on the date. That might be the Boston idea, buthe wanted a little more refinement in his. Said he was a pretty freespender, and would hold his end up, but he hated a hog. Of course I toldHank that Boston wasn't all that it was cracked up to be in the schoolhistories, and that Circle City wasn't so tough as it read in thenewspapers, for there was no way of making him understand that he mighthave lived in Boston for a hundred years without being invited to astrawberry sociable. Because a fellow cuts ice on the Arctic Circle, itdoesn'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 littledifferent, but it isn't any more extreme than lots of others all aroundyou over there and me over here. Of course, I want you to enjoy goodsociety, but any society is good society where congenial men and womenmeet together for wholesome amusement. But I want you to keep away frompeople who choose play for a profession. A man's as good as he makeshimself, 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 andas full of prance as a spotted circus horse. Those Dutchmen ain't so badas their language, after all, for they've fixed up my rheumatism so thatI can bear down on my right leg without thinking that it's going tobreak off. 

I'm glad to learn from your letter that you're getting along so well inyour new place, and I hope that when I get home your boss will back upall 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 theone subject on which most men are perfectly frank, and it's about theonly one on which it isn't necessary to be. There's never any use tryingto 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 totalk about them. When the jaws really need exercise, chew gum. 

Some men go through life on the Sarsaparilla Theory--that they've got togive a hundred doses of talk about themselves for every dollar whichthey take in; and that's a pretty good theory when you're getting adollar for ten cents' worth of ingredients. But a man who's giving adollar's worth of himself for ninety-nine cents doesn't need to throw inany explanations. 

Of course, you're going to meet fellows right along who pass as good menfor a while, because they say they're good men; just as a lot of fivesare in circulation which are accepted at their face value until theywork up to the receiving teller. And you're going to see these mentaking buzzards and coining eagles from them that will fool people solong as they can keep them in the air; but sooner or later they're boundto 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'snaturally going to have the farmers gaping at him. But in the end therealways comes a time when the parachute fails to work. I don't knowanything that's quite so dead as a man who's fallen three or fourthousand feet off the edge of a cloud. 

The only way to gratify a taste for scenery is to climb a mountain. Youdon'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, butnot 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 theirnecks. The path isn't the shortest way to the top, but it's usually thesafest way. 

Life isn't a spurt, but a long, steady climb. You can't run far up-hillwithout stopping to sit down. Some men do a day's work and then spendsix lolling around admiring it. They rush at a thing with a whoop anduse up all their wind in that. And when they're rested and have got itback, they whoop again and start off in a new direction. They mistakeintention for determination, and after they have told you what theypropose 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, butwhen it comes to right-down, plum foolishness, give me a rooster, everytime. He's always strutting and stretching and crowing and braggingabout things with which he had nothing to do. When the sun rises, you'dthink that he was making all the light, instead of all the noise; whenthe farmer's wife throws the scraps in the henyard, he crows as if hewas the provider for the whole farmyard and was asking a blessing on thefood; when he meets another rooster, he crows; and when the otherrooster licks him, he crows; and so he keeps it up straight through theday. He even wakes up during the night and crows a little on generalprinciples. But when you hear from a hen, she's laid an egg, and shedon'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 inmind all the time that steady, quiet, persistent, plain work can't beimitated or replaced by anything just as good, and because your requestfor a job for Courtland Warrington naturally brings them up. You writethat Court says that a man who has occupied his position in the worldnaturally can't cheapen himself by stepping down into any littlepiddling job where he'd have to do undignified things. 

I want to start right out by saying that I know Court and his wholebreed 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 workdown to the bottom, because that is where they belong. His father gavehim an interest in the concern when he left college, and since the oldman failed three years ago and took a salary himself, Court's beensponging on him and waiting for a nice, dignified job to come along andsteal him. But we are not in the kidnapping business. 

The only undignified job I know of is loafing, and nothing can cheapen aman who sponges instead of hunting any sort of work, because he's ascheap already as they can be made. I never could quite understand thesefellows who keep down every decent instinct in order to keep upappearance, and who will stoop to any sort of real meanness to boost uptheir false pride. 

[Illustration: "_Jim Hicks dared Fatty Wilkins to eat a piece ofdirt. _"]

They always remind me of little Fatty Wilkins, who came to live in ourtown 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 samething. Looked like he'd been taken from a joke book. Used to be a greateater. Stuffed himself till his hide was stretched as tight as a sausageskin, and then howled for painkiller. Spent all his pennies for cakes, because candy wasn't filling enough. Hogged 'em in the shop, for fear hewould 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 specialsecret of it when he was around. He was a mighty brave boy and a mightystrong boy and a mighty proud boy--with his mouth; but he always managedto slip out of anything that looked like a fight by having a sore handor a case of the mumps. The truth of the matter was that he was afraidof everything except food, and that was the thing which was hurting himmost. It's mighty seldom that a fellow's afraid of what he ought to beafraid of in this world. 

Of course, like most cowards, while Fatty always had an excuse for notdoing something that might hurt his skin, he would take a dare to doanything that would hurt his self-respect, for fear the boys would laughat him, or say that he was afraid, if he refused. So one day duringrecess Jim Hicks dared him to eat a piece of dirt. Fatty hesitated alittle, because, while he was pretty promiscuous about what he put intohis stomach, he had never included dirt in his bill-of-fare. But whenthe 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 themwould take the dare, it made him mighty proud and puffed up. Got tocharging the bigger boys and the lounger around the post-office a centto see him eat a piece of dirt the size of a hickory-nut. Found therewas good money in that, and added grasshoppers, at two cents apiece, asa side line. Found them so popular that he took on chinch bugs at anickel, and fairly coined money. The last I heard of Fatty he was in aDime Museum, drawing two salaries--one as "The Fat Man, " and the otheras "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'lleat a little dirt "for fun" or to show off, and who'll eat a little morebecause they find that there's some easy money or times in it. It's hardto get at these men, because when they've lost everything they had to beproud of, they still keep their pride. You can always bet that when afellow's pride makes him touchy, it's because there are some mighty rawspots on it. 

It's been my experience that pride is usually a spur to the strong and adrag on the weak. It drives the strong man along and holds the weak oneback. It makes the fellow with the stiff upper lip and the square jawsmile at a laugh and laugh at a sneer; it keeps his conscience straightand his back humped over his work; it makes him appreciate the littlethings and fight for the big ones. But it makes the fellow with theretreating forehead do the thing that looks right, instead of the thingthat is right; it makes him fear a laugh and shrivel up at a sneer; itmakes him live to-day on to-morrow's salary; it makes him a cheapimitation 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 pettylarceny pride that I don't think of a little experience of mine when Iwas 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 hadexpected if I got caught, he led me home by the ear to my ma, and toldher what I had been up to. 

Your grandma had been raised on the old-fashioned plan, and she hadnever heard of these new-fangled theories of reasoning gently with achild till its under lip begins to stick out and its eyes to fill withtears 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 apretty substantial woman. Nothing of the tootsey-wootsey about her foot, and nothing of the airy-fairy trifle about her slipper. When she wasthrough I knew that I'd been licked--polished right off to a point--andthen she sent me to my room and told me not to poke my nose out of ittill I could recite the Ten Commandments and the Sunday-school lesson byheart. 

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 twohours 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-schoolroom and scare the scholars into fits by going around from class toclass and asking questions. That next Sunday, for the first time, I wasglad to see him happen in, and I didn't try to escape attention when heworked around to our class. For ten minutes I'd been busting for him toask me to recite a verse of the lesson, and, when he did, I simply cutloose and recited the whole chapter and threw in the Ten Commandmentsfor good measure. It sort of dazed the Doc, because he had come to mefor information about the Old Testament before, and we'd never got muchbeyond, And Ahab begat Jahab, or words to that effect. But when he gotover the shock he made me stand right up before the whole school and doit again. Patted me on the head and said I was "an honor to my parentsand 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 theback of the room, where she had stopped for a moment on her way up tochurch, 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 therewas no place to hide, though I reckon I could have crawled into a rathole. 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 wasno switching her off on to the weather when she wanted to talkreligion. So I shut my eyes and let it come, though it caught on mypalate once or twice on the way out. 

"Hooked a watermelon, mam. "

There wasn't any need for further particulars with that crowd, and theysimply howled. Ma led me up to our pew, allowing that she'd tend to meMonday for disgracing her in public that way--and she did. 

That was a twelve-grain dose, without any sugar coat, but it sweat morecant and false pride out of my system than I could get back into it forthe next twenty years. I learned right there how to be humble, which isa heap more important than knowing how to be proud. There are mighty fewmen 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 notethe inclosed clippings. You needn't pay any special attention to thisnewspaper talk about the Comstock crowd having caught me short a bigline of November lard. I never sell goods without knowing where I canfind them when I want them, and if these fellows try to put theirforefeet in the trough, or start any shoving and crowding, they're goingto find me forgetting my table manners, too. For when it comes to funnybusiness I'm something of a humorist myself. And while I'm too old torun, I'm young enough to stand and fight. 

First and last, a good many men have gone gunning for me, but they'vealways planned the obsequies before they caught the deceased. I reckonthere 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 theBoard of Trade. But the first essential of a quiet funeral is a willingcorpse. And I'm still sitting up and taking nourishment. 

There are two things you never want to pay any attention to--abuse andflattery. The first can't harm you and the second can't help you. Somemen are like yellow dogs--when you're coming toward them they'll jump upand try to lick your hands; and when you're walking away from themthey'll sneak up behind and snap at your heels. Last year, when I wasbulling the market, the longs all said that I was a kind-hearted oldphilanthropist, who was laying awake nights scheming to get the farmersa top price for their hogs; and the shorts allowed that I was aninfamous old robber, who was stealing the pork out of the workingman'spot. As long as you can't please both sides in this world, there'snothing like pleasing your own side. 

There are mighty few people who can see any side to a thing except theirown side. I remember once I had a vacant lot out on the Avenue, and alady came in to my office and in a soothing-syrupy way asked if I wouldlend it to her, as she wanted to build a _crèche_ on it. I hesitated alittle, because I had never heard of a _crèche_ before, and someways itsounded sort of foreign and frisky, though the woman looked like a good, safe, reliable old heifer. But she explained that a _crèche_ was a babyfarm, where old maids went to wash and feed and stick pins in otherpeople's children while their mothers were off at work. Of course, therewas nothing in that to get our pastor or the police after me, so I toldher to go ahead. 

She went off happy, but about a week later she dropped in again, lookingsort of dissatisfied, to find out if I wouldn't build the _crèche_itself. It seemed like a worthy object, so I sent some carpenters overto knock together a long frame pavilion. She was mighty grateful, youbet, and I didn't see her again for a fortnight. Then she called by tosay that so long as I was in the business and they didn't cost meanything special, would I mind giving her a few cows. She had asurprised and grieved expression on her face as she talked, and the wayshe put it made me feel that I ought to be ashamed of myself for nothaving thought of the live stock myself. So I threw in half a dozen cowsto provide the refreshments. 

I thought that was pretty good measure, but the carpenters hadn't morethan finished with the pavilion before the woman telephoned a sharpmessage to ask why I hadn't had it painted. 

I was too busy that morning to quarrel, so I sent word that I would fixit up; and when I was driving by there next day the painters were hardat work on it. There was a sixty-foot frontage of that shed on theAvenue, and I saw right off that it was just a natural signboard. So Icalled over the boss painter and between us we cooked up a nice littlead 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 justscratched gravel. Went all around town saying that I had given afive-hundred-dollar shed to charity and painted a thousand-dollar ad onit. 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 tobuild 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 agood deal more than money out of it; but the only thing I've ever putinto it which didn't draw dividends in fun or dollars was worry. That isa branch of the trade which you want to leave to our competitors. 

I've always found worrying a blamed sight more uncertain thanhorse-racing--it's harder to pick a winner at it. You go home worryingbecause you're afraid that your fool new clerk forgot to lock the safeafter you, and during the night the lard refinery burns down; you spenda year fretting because you think Bill Jones is going to cut you outwith 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 hewrites you that he's been elected president of the Y. M. C. A. ; and youworry over William because he's so pious that you're afraid he's goingto throw up everything and go to China as a missionary, and he draws onyou for a hundred; you worry because you're afraid your business isgoing to smash, and your health busts up instead. Worrying is the onegame in which, if you guess right, you don't get any satisfaction out ofyour smartness. A busy man has no time to bother with it. He can alwaysfind plenty of old women in skirts or trousers to spend their daysworrying over their own troubles and to sit up nights waking his. 

Speaking of handing over your worries to others naturally calls to mindthe Widow Williams and her son Bud, who was a playmate of mine when Iwas a boy. Bud was the youngest of the Widow's troubles, and she was awoman whose troubles seldom came singly. Had fourteen altogether, andfour pair of 'em were twins. Used to turn 'em loose in the morning, whenshe let out her cows and pigs to browse along the street, and then she'dshed all worry over them for the rest of the day. Allowed that if theygot hurt the neighbors would bring them home; and that if they gothungry they'd come home. And someways, the whole drove always showed upsafe and dirty about meal time. 

I've no doubt she thought a lot of Bud, but when a woman has fourteen itsort of unsettles her mind so that she can't focus her affections orplay any favorites. And so when Bud's clothes were found at the swimminghole one day, and no Bud inside them, she didn't take on up to theexpectations of the neighbors who had brought the news, and who werestanding around waiting for her to go off into something special in theway of high-strikes. 

She allowed that they were Bud's clothes, all right, but she wanted toknow where the remains were. Hinted that there'd be no funeral, or suchlike expensive goings-on, until some one produced the deceased. Take herby and large, she was a pretty cool, calm cucumber. 

But if she showed a little too much Christian resignation, the rest ofthe town was mightily stirred up over Bud's death, and every one justquit work to tell each other what a noble little fellow he was; and howhis mother hadn't deserved to have such a bright little sunbeam in herhome; 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 whodidn't show any special interest, except to ask for results. Butfinally, at the end of a week, when they'd strained the whole riverthrough their drags and hadn't anything to show for it but a collectionof tin cans and dead catfish, she threw a shawl over her head and wentdown the street to the cabin of Louisiana Clytemnestra, an old yellowwoman, who would go into a trance for four bits and find a fortune foryou for a dollar. I reckon she'd have called herself a clairvoyantnowadays, but then she was just a voodoo woman. 

Well, the Widow said she reckoned that boys ought to be let out as wellas in for half price, and so she laid down two bits, allowing that shewanted a few minutes' private conversation with her Bud. Clytie saidshe'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 makethem mad to be called away from their high jinks if they were taking alittle recreation, or from their high-priced New York customers if theywere working, to tend to cut-rate business. Still, she'd have a try, andshe 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 hewouldn't answer for any two-bits. 

[Illustration: "_Elder Hoover was accounted a powerful exhorter in ourparts. _"]

The Widow was badly disappointed, but she allowed that that was justlike Bud. He'd always been a boy that never could be found when any onewanted him. So she went off, saying that she'd had her money's worth inseeing Clytie throw those fancy fits. But next day she came again andpaid down four bits, and Clytie reckoned that that ought to fetch Budsure. Someways though, she didn't have any luck, and finally the Widowsuggested that she call up Bud's father--Buck Williams had been dead amatter 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 thechurch 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 cameback 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 arap from him. Clytie trotted out George Washington, and Napoleon, andBilly Patterson, and Ben Franklin, and Captain Kidd, just to show thatthere was no deception, but they couldn't get a whisper even from Bud. 

I reckon Clytie had been stringing the old lady along, intending toproduce Bud's spook as a sort of red-fire, calcium-light, grand-march-of-the-Amazons climax, but she didn't get a chance. Forright there the old lady got up with a mighty set expression around herlips and marched out, muttering that it was just as she had thought allalong--Bud wasn't there. And when the neighbors dropped in thatafternoon to plan out a memorial service for her "lost lamb, " she chasedthem off the lot with a broom. Said that they had looked in the riverfor him and that she had looked beyond the river for him, and that theywould just stand pat now and wait for him to make the next move. Allowedthat if she could once get her hands in "that lost lamb's" wool theremight be an opening for a funeral when she got through with him, butthere wouldn't be till then. Altogether, it looked as if there was aheap of trouble coming to Bud if he had made any mistake and was stillalive. 

The Widow found her "lost lamb" hiding behind a rain-barrel when sheopened up the house next morning, and there was a mighty touching andaffecting scene. In fact, the Widow must have touched him at least ahundred times and every time he was affected to tears, for she was usinga bed slat, which is a powerfully strong moral agent for making a boysee the error of his ways. And it was a month after that before Budcould go down Main Street without some man who had called him a noblelittle 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 andput the laugh on him. 

No one except the Widow ever really got at the straight of Bud'sconduct, 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 thetime to do your worrying is when a thing is all over, and that the wayto 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 intentionsthere? She knows a heap more about you than she ought to know if they'renot serious, and I know a heap less about her than I ought to know ifthey are. Hadn't got out of sight of land before we'd become acquaintedsomehow, and she's been treating me like a father clear across theAtlantic. She's a mighty pretty girl, and a mighty nice girl, and amighty sensible girl--in fact she's so exactly the sort of girl I'd liketo 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 wholelot of happiness with fifty dollars a week when you have the right sortof a woman for your purchasing agent. And while I don't go much on lovein a cottage, love in a flat, with fifty a week as a starter, is justabout right, if the girl is just about right. If she isn't, it doesn'tmake any special difference how you start out, you're going to end upall wrong. 

Money ought never to be _the_ consideration in marriage, but it alwaysought to be _a_ consideration. When a boy and a girl don't think enoughabout money before the ceremony, they're going to have to think altogethertoo much about it after; and when a man's doing sums at home evenings, itcomes 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 goodwife doubles a man's expenses and doubles his happiness, and that's apretty good investment if a fellow's got the money to invest. I have metwomen who had cut their husband's expenses in half, but they needed themoney because they had doubled their own. I might add, too, that I'vemet a good many husbands who had cut their wives' expenses in half, andthey fit naturally into any discussion of our business, because theyare hogs. There's a point where economy becomes a vice, and that's whena man leaves its practice to his wife. 

An unmarried man is a good deal like a piece of unimproved realestate--he may be worth a whole lot of money, but he isn't of anyparticular use except to build on. The great trouble with a lot of thesefellows is that they're "made land, " and if you dig down a few feet youstrike ooze and booze under the layer of dollars that their daddiesdumped in on top. Of course, the only way to deal with a proposition ofthat sort is to drive forty-foot piles clear down to solid rock and thento 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 andwonder what's the matter when the walls begin to crack and tumble abouttheir 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-fifthbirthday. I didn't relish the job particularly, because Jack was one ofthese charlotte-russe boys, all whipped cream and sponge cake andhigh-priced flavoring extracts, without any filling qualities. Therewasn'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 anout and out cuss than for one who's simply made up of a lot of littletrifling 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 beenone 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 Iinherited Jack--he was twenty-three years old then--your Ma kept afterme so strong that I finally put on my fancy harness and let her trot mearound to a meet at the Ralstons one evening. Of course, I was in thePercheron class, and so I just stood around with a lot of heavy olddraft horses, who ought to have been resting up in their stalls, andwatched the three-year-olds prance and cavort round the ring. Jack wasamong them, of course, dancing with the youngest Churchill girl, andholding her a little tighter, I thought, than was necessary to keep herfrom falling. Had both ends working at once--never missed a stitch withhis heels and was turning out a steady stream of fancy work with hismouth. And all the time he was looking at that girl as intent and eageras a Scotch terrier at a rat hole. 

I happened just then to be pinned into a corner with two or three womenwho couldn't escape--Edith Curzon, a great big brunette whom I knew Jackhad 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 ahair-pulling itch in their finger-tips. In fact, it looked to me as ifthe 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 littlesmoking-room, Jack came charging in, and, without any sparring for anopening, 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, blackway, 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'sjust 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, orsomething of that sort. I forget just the words, but they were mightybeautiful thoughts and did you credit. "

"Don't remind me of it, " Jack groaned. "It makes me sick every time Ithink what an ass I've been. "

I allowed that I felt a little nausea myself, but I told him that thistime, at least, he'd shown some sense; that Miss Churchill was a mightypretty girl and rich enough so that her liking him didn't prove anythingworse against her than bad judgment; and that the thing for him to dowas 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 withit:

"That's the deuce of it, " says he. "I'm in a beastly mess--I want tomarry her--she's the only girl in the world for me--the only one I'veever really loved, and I've proposed--that is, I want to propose toher, but I'm engaged to Edith Curzon on the quiet. "

"I reckon you'll marry her, then, " I said; "because she strikes me as ayoung woman who's not going to lose a million dollars without putting atracer 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 thequiet, 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-barreleddonkey as to give her an option on yourself, too?"

"No, no; but I've said things to her which she may have misconstrued, ifshe's inclined to be literal. "

"You bet she is, " I answered. "I never saw a nice, fat, blonde girl whotook a million-dollar offer as a practical joke. What is it you've saidto her? 'I love you, darling, ' or something about as foxy andnoncommittal. "

"Not that--not that at all; but she may have stretched what I said tomean that. "

Well, sir, I just laid into that fellow when I heard that, though Icould see that he didn't think it was refined of me. He'd never made itany secret that he thought me a pretty coarse old man, and his faceshowed me now that I was jarring his delicate works. 

"I suppose I have been indiscreet, " he said, "but I must say I expectedsomething 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 methe truth. How have you managed to keep this Curzon girl from announcingher engagement to you?"

"Well, " and there was a scared grin on Jack's face now; "I told herthat you, as trustee under father's will, had certain unpleasant powersover my money--in fact, that most of it would revert to Sis if I marriedagainst your wishes, and that you disliked her, and that she must workherself into your good graces before we could think of announcing ourengagement. "

I saw right off that he had told Mabel Moore the same thing, and thatwas why those two girls had been so blamed polite to me the nightbefore. 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, andyou 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 MissChurchill?"

Jack cheered right up. "I'm all right there, at least. She hasn'tanswered. "

"Then you've asked?"

"Why, so I have; at least she may take it for something like asking. ButI 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 straightat the spigot. Told him to save it till after the ceremony. Set him downto my desk, and dictated two letters, one to Edith Curzon and the otherto Mabel Moore, and made him sign and seal them, then and there. Hetwisted and squirmed and tried to wiggle off the hook, but I wouldn'tgive him any slack. Made him come right out and say that he was a yellowpup; that he had made a mistake; and that the stuff was all off, thoughI worded it a little different from that. Slung in some fancy words andhigh-toned phrases. 

You see, I had made up my mind that the best of a bad matter was theChurchill girl, and I didn't propose to have her commit herself, too, until I'd sort of cleared away the wreckage. Then I reckoned oncopper-riveting their engagement by announcing it myself and standingover 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 thatit seemed to me that they were just naturally mates. 

Jack reached for those letters when they were addressed and started toput them in his pocket, but I had reached first. I reckon he'd decidedthat something might happen to them on their way to the post-office; butnothing did, for I called in the butler and made him go right out andmail them then and there. 

I'd had the letters dated from my house, and I made Jack spend the nightthere. I reckoned it might be as well to keep him within reachingdistance for the next day or two. He showed up at breakfast in themorning looking like a calf on the way to the killing pens, and I couldsee that his thoughts were mighty busy following the postman who wasdelivering those letters. I tried to cheer him up by reading some littleodds and ends from the morning paper about other people's troubles, butthey didn't seem to interest him. 

"They must just about have received them, " he finally groaned into hiscoffee 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'dcalculated on their doing, and said: "Beg pardon, sir, but there's alady asking for you at the telephone. "

"A lady!" says Jack. "Tell her I'm not here. " Talk to one of thosegirls, even from a safe distance! He guessed not. He turned as pale asa hog on ice at the thought of it. 

"I'm sorry, sir, " said the man, "but I've already said that you werebreakfasting here. She said it was very important. "

I could see that Jack's curiosity was already getting the best of hisscare. After all, he threw out, feeling me, it might be best to hearwhat she had to say. I thought so, too, and he went to the instrumentand shouted "Hello!" in what he tried to make a big, brave voice, butit 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'sall about. Come this afternoon and tell me, for we're still goodfriends, 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 anote, 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 ofsneaking 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 youafter that letter. "

"Well, shall I go?"

"Yes, in fact I suppose you must go; but Jack, be a man. Tell 'em plainand straight that you don't love 'em as you should to marry 'em; sayyou saw your old girl a few days ago and found you loved her still, orsomething 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 topropose to take the whole bunch to Utah, and let 'em share and sharealike. 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 towhere she knows there's a little canary meat--scared, but happy--that Isaid 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 asa pigeon on a barn roof, and swung off down the street looking mightyfine and manly from the rear. 

I never really got the straight of it, but I pieced together theseparticulars later. At the corner there was a flower store. Jack steppedinside and sent a box of roses by special messenger to Miss Curzon, sothere might be something to start conversation when he got there. Twoblocks farther on he passed a second florist's, turned back and sentsome lilies to Miss Moore, for fear she might think he'd forgotten herduring the hour or more before he could work around to her house. Thenhe chased about and found a third florist, from whom he ordered someviolets for Miss Churchill, to remind her that she had promised him thefirst dance at the Blairs' that night. Your Ma told me that Jack hadnice instincts about these little things which women like, and alwaysput a good deal of heavy thought into selecting his flowers for them. It's been my experience that a critter who has instincts instead ofsense 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 setto his jaw, but it dropped as if the spring had broken when he caughtsight 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 thewhole business, I take it?" but I knew mighty well from his looks thathe hadn't settled anything. 

"Not--not exactly--that is to say, entirely; but I've made a verysatisfactory beginning. "

"Began it all over again, I suppose. "

This hit so near the truth that Jack jumped, in spite of himself, andthen he burst out with a really swear. I couldn't have been moresurprised if your Ma had cussed. 

"Damn it, sir, I won't stand any more of your confounded meddling. Thoseletters were a piece of outrageous brutality. I'm breaking off with thegirls, 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 themharder and tighter than ever. "

I could see I'd made a bull's eye, for Jack began to bluster, but I cuthim short with:

"Go to the devil your own way, " and walked out of the club. I reckonthat Jack felt mighty disturbed for as much as an hour, but a gooddinner took the creases out of his system. He'd found that Miss Mooredidn't intend to go to the Blairs', and that Miss Curzon had planned togo to a dance with her sister somewheres else, so he calculated onhaving 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 tothe Blairs' myself, for it looked to me as if the finals might betrotted there, and I thought I'd better be around, because, while Ididn't see much chance of getting any sense into Jack's head, I felt Iought 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 wastending to business so strictly that he didn't see me bearing down onhim from one side of the room, nor Edith Curzon's sister, Mrs. Dick, amighty 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 acorner. There must have been a council of war between the sisters thatafternoon, 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 armwith her fan. 

"Dear Jack, " she says, all smiles and sugar; "dear Jack, I've justheard. Edith has told me, though I'd suspected something for a long, long time, you rogue, " and she fetched him another kittenish clip withthe fan. 

Jack looked about the way I once saw old Miss Curley, the president ofthe Good Templars back in our town in Missouri, look at a party when shehalf-swallowed a spoonful of her ice cream before she discovered that itwas flavored with liquor. 

But he stammered something and hurried Miss Churchill away, though notbefore 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 hedragged his partner along to the other end of the room, while Ifollowed the band. We had almost gone the length of the course, whenJack, who had been staring ahead mighty hard, shied and balked, forthere, not ten feet away, stood Miss Moore, carrying his lilies, andblushing and smiling at something young Blakely was saying to her. 

I reckon Jack guessed what that something was, but just then Blakelycaught 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 andlooked at Jack. Her lips were laughing, but there was something in hereye 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. Hedodged around Miss Moore, and made a flank movement which got him byMiss 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 gonethere, bought a ticket for Europe, and was just loafing around the piertrying to hurry the steamer off. I went down to see him start, and helooked so miserable that I'd have felt sorry for him if I hadn't seenhim look miserable before. 

"Is it generally known, sir, do you think?" he asked me humbly. "Can'tyou hush it up somehow?"

"Hush it up! You might as well say 'Shoo!' to the Limited and expect itto stop for you. "

"Mr. Graham, I'm simply heartbroken over it all. I know I shall neverreach Liverpool. I'll go mad on the voyage across, and throw myselfoverboard. 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 seeingme, for his grief-dimmed eyes, in straying along the deck, had lit onthat pretty little Southern baggage, Fanny Fairfax. And as I started offhe was leaning over her in the same old way, looking into her brown eyesas if he saw a full-course dinner there. 

"Think of _your_ being on board!" I heard him say. "I'm the luckiestfellow alive; by Jove, I am!"

I gave Jack up, and an ex-grass widow is keeping him in order now. Idon't go much on grass widows, but I give her credit for doing a prettygood job. She's got Jack so tame that he eats out of her hand, and sowell 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 wakeup and find another one in the family. So you write me what's what byreturn. 

 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 getmarried too quick to suit the old man. I believe in short engagementsand long marriages. I don't see any sense in a fellow's sitting aroundon 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 andher back hair match, and then holler that they're stuck when they findthat she's got a cork leg and a glass eye as well. I haven't anysympathy with them. They start out on the principle that married peoplehave only one meal a day, and that of fried oysters and tutti-fruttiice-cream after the theatre. Naturally, a girl's got her better natureand her best complexion along under those circumstances; but the reallyvaluable 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 allthe time between eight and eleven P. M. , for the rest of their lives, holding a hundred and forty pounds, live weight, in their lap, andsaying 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, forfive 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 showiestgoods on the shelf, but the vital thing for a fellow to know is whetherher ears are sharp enough to hear him when he shouts that she's spendingtoo much money and that she must reduce expenses. Of course, when you'repatting and petting and feeding a woman she's going to purr, but there'snothing like stirring her up a little now and then to see if she spitsfire and heaves things when she's mad. 

I want to say right here that there's only one thing more aggravating inthis world than a woman who gets noisy when she's mad, and that's onewho gets quiet. The first breaks her spell of temper with the crockery, but the second simmers along like a freight engine on the track besideyour berth--keeps you scared and ready to jump for fear she's going toblow off any minute; but she never does and gets it over with--justdrizzles it out. 

You can punch your brother when he plays the martyr, but you've got tolove your wife. A violent woman drives a fellow to drink, but a naggingone drives him crazy. She takes his faults and ties them to him like atin can to a yellow dog's tail, and the harder he runs to get away fromthem the more he hears of them. 

I simply mention these things in a general way, and in the spirit of thepreacher at the funeral of the man who wasn't "a professor"--becauseit'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 bestof 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. Infact, 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 stockin them in the office, though I reckon I'm prejudiced and they've cometo stay. I never do business with a woman that I don't think of a littleincident which happened when I was first married to your Ma. We set uphousekeeping in one of those cottages that you read about in the storybooks, but that you want to shy away from, when it's put up to you tolive 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 fashionedposies in the front yard, and a-plenty of rats in the cellar; there washalf an acre of ground out back, but so little room inside that I had tosit 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 picnickingbefore he's married. 

Your Ma did the cooking, and I hustled for things to cook, though Iwould take a shy at it myself once in a while and get up my muscletossing flapjacks. It was pretty rough sailing, you bet, but one way andanother we managed to get a good deal of satisfaction out of it, becausewe had made up our minds to take our fun as we went along. With mostpeople happiness is something that is always just a day off. But I havemade it a rule never to put off being happy till to-morrow. Don't acceptnotes for happiness, because you'll find that when they're due they'renever paid, but just renewed for another thirty days. 

I was clerking in a general store at that time, but I had a littleweakness for livestock, even then; and while I couldn't afford to plungein it exactly, I managed to buy a likely little shoat that I reckoned oncarrying through the Summer on credit and presenting with a bill forboard in the Fall. He was just a plain pig when he came to us, and wekept him in a little sty, but we weren't long in finding out that hewasn't any ordinary root-and-grunt pig. The first I knew your Ma wascalling him Toby, and had turned him loose. Answered to his name like adog. 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 roadsquealing for joy when he saw me coming home from work. 

Well, it got on towards November and Toby had been making the most ofhis 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 wasattached to him myself, in a sort of a sneaking way, but I was mightyfond of hog meat, too, and we needed Toby in the kitchen. So I sentaround and had him butchered. 

When I got home to dinner next day, I noticed that your Ma looked mightysolemn as she set the roast of pork down in front of me, but I strayedoff, thinking of something else, as I carved, and my wits were off woolgathering 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 outcrying and ran away from the table. But when I went after her and askedher what was the matter, she stopped crying and was mad in a minute allthe way through. Called me a heartless, cruel cannibal. That seemed torelieve her so that she got over her mad and began to cry again. Beggedme to take Toby out of pickle and to bury him in the garden. I reasonedwith 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 funeralfor us. But first and last she had managed to take my appetite away sothat 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 theCrossing, who I knew would be able to gaze on his hams without burstinginto tears, and got a pretty fair price for him. 

I simply mention Toby in passing, as an example of why I believe womenweren'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'sbeen my experience that when they've got a weak case they add their sexto it and win, and that when they've got a strong case they subtracttheir sex from it and deal with you harder than a man. They're simplybound to win either way, and I don't like to play a game where I haven'tany show. When a clerk makes a fool break, I don't want to beg hispardon for calling his attention to it, and I don't want him to blushand 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 waystoo much at home to care very much for them at the office. Instead ofhiring women, I try to hire their husbands, and then I usually have themboth working for me. There's nothing like a woman at home to spur on aman at the office. 

A married man is worth more salary than a single one, because his wifemakes him worth more. He's apt to go to bed a little sooner and to getup a little earlier; to go a little steadier and to work a little harderthan the fellow who's got to amuse a different girl every night, andcan't stay at home to do it. That's why I'm going to raise your salaryto seventy-five dollars a week the day you marry Helen, and that's whyI'm going to quit writing these letters--I'm simply going to turn youover to her and let her keep you in order. I bet she'll do a better jobthan I have. 

 Your affectionate father, JOHN GRAHAM. 

 THE END

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=ROUND RABBIT, THE. And Other Child Verse=

A new holiday edition of Mrs. Lee's delightful verse, which includes anumber of new poems. With illustrations by O'Neill Latham. 

"The mother who (can read) to her young ones these cheerful, sweet, andfascinating jingles, with the pretty quaint conceits and ingeniousrimes, without chuckling and forgetting her woes, will be indeed deeplydyed in cerulean. "--_The Bookseller, Newsdealer, and Stationer. _

Cloth, decorative, 7-7/8 x 6-1/4 in. Net, =$1. 00=

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 A STANDARD LIBRARY OF BIOGRAPHY

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_THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES OF EMINENT AMERICANS_

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The aim of this series is to furnish brief, readable, and authenticaccounts of the lives of those Americans whose personalities haveimpressed themselves most deeply on the character and history of theircountry. On account of the length of the more formal lives, oftenrunning into large volumes, the average busy man and woman have not thetime or hardly the inclination to acquaint themselves with Americanbiography. In the present series everything that such a reader wouldordinarily care to know is given by writers of special competence, whopossess in full measure the best contemporary point of view. Each volumeis equipped with a photogravure portrait, an engraved title-page, acalendar of important dates, and a brief bibliography for furtherreading. Finally, the volumes are printed in a form convenient forreading and for carrying handily in the pocket. 

"They contain exactly what every intelligent American ought to knowabout the lives of our great men. "--_Boston Herald. _

"Surprisingly complete studies, . .. Admirably planned andexecuted. "--_Christian Register. _

"Prepared as carefully as if they were so many imperial quartos, insteadof being so small that they may be carried in the pocket. "--_New YorkTimes. _

"They are books of marked excellence. "--_Chicago Inter-Ocean. _

"They interest vividly, and their instruction is surprisinglycomprehensive. "--_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. | | | | Price per volume, cloth, 75c. _net_, lambskin, $1. 00 _net. _ | | | | SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers. | +-------------------------------------------------------------+