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[Illustration: "_Young fellows come to me looking for jobs and telling
me what a mean house they have been working for._"]

            Letters from
        A Self-Made Merchant
             To His Son

Being the Letters written by John Graham,
Head of the House of Graham & Company,
Pork-Packers in Chicago, familiarly known
on 'Change as "Old Gorgon Graham," to
his Son, Pierrepont, facetiously known
to his intimates as "Piggy."

Boston: Small, Maynard & Company: 1903

          _Copyright, 1901-1902,  by_
          _THE CURTIS PUBLISHING CO._

          _Copyright, 1901-1902,  by_
            _GEORGE HORACE LORIMER_

             _Copyright, 1902,  by_
           _SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY_
                (_Incorporated_)

         _Entered at Stationers' Hall_

           _Published October, 1902_

       _Sixtieth Thousand December, 1902_

                  _Plates by_
        _Riggs Printing & Publishing Co._
               _Albany,  U.S.A._

                 _Presswork by_
            _The University Press,_
              _Cambridge, U.S.A._

                      TO
                 CYRUS CURTIS
               A SELF-MADE MAN

CONTENTS                                                      PAGE

 I. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
 to his son, Pierrepont, at Harvard University, Cambridge,
 Mass.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has just become a member, in good and
     regular standing, of the Freshman class._                   1

 II. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
 to his son, Pierrepont, at Harvard University.
     _Mr. Pierrepont's expense account has just passed
     under his father's eye, and has furnished him with a
     text for some plain particularities._                      15

 III. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in
 Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Harvard University.
     _Mr. Pierrepont finds Cambridge to his liking, and has
     suggested that he take a post-graduate course to fill
     up some gaps which he has found in his education._         29

 IV. From John Graham, head of the house of Graham & Co.,
 at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son,
 Pierrepont Graham, at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has suggested the grand tour as a
     proper finish to his education._                           45

 V. From John Graham, head of the house of Graham & Co., at
 the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont
 Graham, at Lake Moosgatchemawamuc, in the Maine woods.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has written to his father withdrawing
     his suggestion._                                           57

 VI. From John Graham, en route to Texas, to Pierrepont
 Graham, care of Graham & Co., Union Stock Yards, Chicago.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has, entirely without intention,
     caused a little confusion in the mails, and it has
     come to his father's notice in the course of
     business._                                                 69

 VII. From John Graham, at the Omaha Branch of Graham & Co.,
 to Pierrepont Graham, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago.
     _Mr. Pierrepont hasn't found the methods of the worthy
     Milligan altogether to his liking, and he has
     commented rather freely on them._                          81

 VIII. From John Graham, at Hot Springs, Arkansas, to his
 son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has just been promoted from the
     mailing to the billing desk and, in consequence, his
     father is feeling rather "mellow" toward him._             93

 IX. From John Graham, at Hot Springs, Arkansas, to his son,
 Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has been investing more heavily in
     roses than his father thinks his means warrant, and he
     tries to turn his thoughts to staple groceries._          113

 X. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
 to his son, Pierrepont, at the Commercial House,
 Jeffersonville, Indiana.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has been promoted to the position of
     traveling salesman for the house, and has started out
     on the road._                                             127

 XI. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
 to his son, Pierrepont, at The Planters' Palace Hotel, at
 Big Gap, Kentucky.
     _Mr. Pierrepont's orders are small and his expenses
     are large, so his father feels pessimistic over his
     prospects._                                               141

 XII. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in
 Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Little Delmonico's,
 Prairie Centre, Indiana.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has annoyed his father by accepting
     his criticisms in a spirit of gentle, but most
     reprehensible, resignation._                              157

 XIII. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in
 Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, care of The Hoosier
 Grocery Co., Indianapolis, Indiana.
     _Mr. Pierrepont's orders have been looking up, so the
     old man gives him a pat on the back--but not too hard
     a one._                                                   177

 XIV. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
 to his son, Pierrepont, at The Travelers' Rest, New Albany,
 Indiana.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has taken a little flyer in short ribs
     on 'Change, and has accidentally come into the line of
     his father's vision._                                     191

 XV. From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago,
 to his son, Pierrepont, at The Scrub Oaks, Spring Lake,
 Michigan.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has been promoted again, and the old
     man sends him a little advice with his appointment._      209

 XVI. From John Graham, at the Schweitzerkasenhof, Karlsbad,
 Austria, to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards,
 Chicago.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has shown mild symptoms of an attack
     of society fever, and his father is administering some
     simple remedies._                                         223

 XVII. From John Graham, at the London House of Graham &
 Co., to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in
 Chicago.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has written his father that he is
     getting along famously in his new place._                 243

 XVIII. From John Graham, at the London House of Graham &
 Co., to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in
 Chicago.
     _Mr. Pierrepont is worried over rumors that the old
     man is a bear on lard and that the longs are about to
     make him climb a tree._                                   259

 XIX. From John Graham, at the New York house of Graham &
 Co., to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in
 Chicago.
     _The old man, on the voyage home, has met a girl who
     interests him and who in turn seems to be interested
     in Mr. Pierrepont._                                       275

 XX. From John Graham, at the Boston House of Graham & Co.,
 to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in
 Chicago.
     _Mr. Pierrepont has told the old man "what's what" and
     received a limited blessing._                             301

ILLUSTRATIONS

_By_ F. R. GRUGER _and_ B. MARTIN JUSTICE

 1. "Young fellows come to me looking for jobs
       and telling me what a mean house they
       have been working for."                       _Frontispiece_

                                                       _Facing p._

 2. "Old Doc Hoover asked me right out in Sunday
       School if I didn't want to be saved."                     4

 3. "I have seen hundreds of boys go to Europe
       who didn't bring back a great deal except
       a few trunks of badly fitting
       clothes."                                                20

 4. "I put Jim Durham on the road to introduce
       a new product."                                          38

 5. "Old Dick Stover was the worst hand at
       procrastinating that I ever saw."                        50

 6. "Charlie Chase told me he was President of
       the Klondike Exploring, Gold Prospecting,
       and Immigration Company."                                62

 7. "Jim Donnelly, of the Donnelly Provision Company,
       came into my office with a fool grin
       on his fat face."                                        72

 8. "Bill Budlong was always the last man to
       come up to the mourners' bench."                         84

 9. "Clarence looked to me like another of his
       father's bad breaks."                                    98

10. "You looked so blamed important and chesty
       when you started off."                                  128

11. "Josh Jenkinson would eat a little food now
       and then just to be sociable, but what he
       really lived on was tobacco."                           146

12. "Herr Doctor Paracelsus Von Munsterberg
       was a pretty high-toned article."                       166

13. "When John L. Sullivan went through the
       stock yards it just simply shut down the
       plant."                                                 184

14. "I started in to curl up that young fellow
       to a crisp."                                            200

15. "A good many salesmen have an idea that buyers
       are only interested in funny stories."                  216

16. "Jim Hicks dared Fatty Wilkins to eat a
       piece of dirt."                                         248

17. "Elder Hoover was accounted a powerful exhorter
       in our parts."                                          268

18. "Miss Curzon, with one of his roses in her
       hair, watching him from a corner."                      294

                  +------------------------------+
                  |            No. 1             |
                  +------------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, at        |
                  |  the Union Stock Yards       |
                  |  in Chicago, to his son,     |
                  |  Pierrepont, at Harvard      |
                  |  University, Cambridge,      |
                  |  Mass. Mr. Pierrepont has    |
                  |  just been settled by his    |
                  |  mother as a member, in      |
                  |  good and regular standing,  |
                  |  of the Freshman class.      |
                  +------------------------------+

          LETTERS _from a_ SELF-MADE MERCHANT _to his_ SON

                                         CHICAGO, October 1, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ Your Ma got back safe this morning and she wants me
to be sure to tell you not to over-study, and I want to tell you to be
sure not to under-study. What we're really sending you to Harvard for is
to get a little of the education that's so good and plenty there. When
it's passed around you don't want to be bashful, but reach right out and
take a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You'll
find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this
world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of
as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and
the screw-driver lost.

I didn't have your advantages when I was a boy, and you can't have mine.
Some men learn the value of money by not having any and starting out to
pry a few dollars loose from the odd millions that are lying around; and
some learn it by having fifty thousand or so left to them and starting
out to spend it as if it were fifty thousand a year. Some men learn the
value of truth by having to do business with liars; and some by going to
Sunday School. Some men learn the cussedness of whiskey by having a
drunken father; and some by having a good mother. Some men get an
education from other men and newspapers and public libraries; and some
get it from professors and parchments--it doesn't make any special
difference how you get a half-nelson on the right thing, just so you get
it and freeze on to it. The package doesn't count after the eye's been
attracted by it, and in the end it finds its way to the ash heap. It's
the quality of the goods inside which tells, when they once get into the
kitchen and up to the cook.

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

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

I remember when I was a boy, and I wasn't a very bad boy, as boys go,
old Doc Hoover got a notion in his head that I ought to join the church,
and he scared me out of it for five years by asking me right out loud in
Sunday School if I didn't want to be saved, and then laying for me after
the service and praying with me. Of course I wanted to be saved, but I
didn't want to be saved quite so publicly.

When a boy's had a good mother he's got a good conscience, and when he's
got a good conscience he don't need to have right and wrong labeled for
him. Now that your Ma's left and the apron strings are cut, you're
naturally running up against a new sensation every minute, but if you'll
simply use a little conscience as a tryer, and probe into a thing which
looks sweet and sound on the skin, to see if you can't fetch up a sour
smell from around the bone, you'll be all right.

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

I'm anxious that you should be a good scholar, but I'm more anxious that
you should be a good clean man. And if you graduate with a sound
conscience, I shan't care so much if there are a few holes in your
Latin. There are two parts of a college education--the part that you get
in the schoolroom from the professors, and the part that you get outside
of it from the boys. That's the really important part. For the first
can only make you a scholar, while the second can make you a man.

Education's a good deal like eating--a fellow can't always tell which
particular thing did him good, but he can usually tell which one did him
harm. After a square meal of roast beef and vegetables, and mince pie
and watermelon, you can't say just which ingredient is going into muscle,
but you don't have to be very bright to figure out which one started the
demand for painkiller in your insides, or to guess, next morning, which
one made you believe in a personal devil the night before. And so, while
a fellow can't figure out to an ounce whether it's Latin or algebra or
history or what among the solids that is building him up in this place
or that, he can go right along feeding them in and betting that they're
not the things that turn his tongue fuzzy. It's down among the sweets,
among his amusements and recreations, that he's going to find his
stomach-ache, and it's there that he wants to go slow and to pick and
choose.

It's not the first half, but the second half of a college education
which merchants mean when they ask if a college education pays. It's the
Willie and the Bertie boys; the chocolate eclair and tutti-frutti boys;
the la-de-dah and the baa-baa-billy-goat boys; the high cock-a-lo-rum
and the cock-a-doodle-do boys; the Bah Jove!, hair-parted-in-the-middle,
cigaroot-smoking, Champagne-Charlie, up-all-night-and-in-all-day boys
that make 'em doubt the cash value of the college output, and overlook
the roast-beef and blood-gravy boys, the shirt-sleeves and
high-water-pants boys, who take their college education and make some
fellow's business hum with it.

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

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

College doesn't make fools; it develops them. It doesn't make
bright men; it develops them. A fool will turn out a fool, whether
he goes to college or not, though he'll probably turn out a
different sort of a fool. And a good, strong boy will turn out a
bright, strong man whether he's worn smooth in the
grab-what-you-want-and-eat-standing-with-one-eye-skinned-for-the-dog
school of the streets and stores, or polished up and slicked down in the
give-your-order-to-the-waiter-and-get-a-sixteen-course-dinner school of
the professors. But while the lack of a college education can't keep No.
1 down, having it boosts No. 2 up.

It's simply the difference between jump in, rough-and-tumble,
kick-with-the-heels-and-butt-with-the-head nigger
fighting, and this grin-and-look-pleasant,
dodge-and-save-your-wind-till-you-see-a-chance-to-land-on-the-solar-plexus
style of the trained athlete. Both styles win fights, but the fellow
with a little science is the better man, providing he's kept his muscle
hard. If he hasn't, he's in a bad way, for his fancy sparring is just
going to aggravate the other fellow so that he'll eat him up.

Of course, some men are like pigs, the more you educate them, the more
amusing little cusses they become, and the funnier capers they cut when
they show off their tricks. Naturally, the place to send a boy of that
breed is to the circus, not to college.

Speaking of educated pigs, naturally calls to mind the case of old man
Whitaker and his son, Stanley. I used to know the old man mighty well
ten years ago. He was one of those men whom business narrows, instead
of broadens. Didn't get any special fun out of his work, but kept right
along at it because he didn't know anything else. Told me he'd had to
root for a living all his life and that he proposed to have Stan's
brought to him in a pail. Sent him to private schools and dancing
schools and colleges and universities, and then shipped him to Oxford
to soak in a little "atmosphere," as he put it. I never could quite lay
hold of that atmosphere dodge by the tail, but so far as I could make
out, the idea was that there was something in the air of the Oxford
ham-house that gave a fellow an extra fancy smoke.

Well, about the time Stan was through, the undertaker called by for the
old man, and when his assets were boiled down and the water drawn off,
there wasn't enough left to furnish Stan with a really nourishing meal.
I had a talk with Stan about what he was going to do, but some ways he
didn't strike me as having the making of a good private of industry, let
alone a captain, so I started in to get him a job that would suit his
talents. Got him in a bank, but while he knew more about the history of
banking than the president, and more about political economy than the
board of directors, he couldn't learn the difference between a fiver
that the Government turned out and one that was run off on a hand press
in a Halsted Street basement. Got him a job on a paper, but while he
knew six different languages and all the facts about the Arctic regions,
and the history of dancing from the days of Old Adam down to those of
Old Nick, he couldn't write up a satisfactory account of the Ice-Men's
Ball. Could prove that two and two made four by trigonometry and
geometry, but couldn't learn to keep books; was thick as thieves with
all the high-toned poets, but couldn't write a good, snappy,
merchantable street-car ad.; knew a thousand diseases that would take a
man off before he could blink, but couldn't sell a thousand-dollar
tontine policy; knew the lives of our Presidents as well as if he'd been
raised with them, but couldn't place a set of the Library of the Fathers
of the Republic, though they were offered on little easy payments that
made them come as easy as borrowing them from a friend. Finally I hit on
what seemed to be just the right thing. I figured out that any fellow
who had such a heavy stock of information on hand, ought to be able to
job it out to good advantage, and so I got him a place teaching. But it
seemed that he'd learned so much about the best way of teaching boys,
that he told his principal right on the jump that he was doing it all
wrong, and that made him sore; and he knew so much about the dead
languages, which was what he was hired to teach, that he forgot he was
handling live boys, and as he couldn't tell it all to them in the
regular time, he kept them after hours, and that made them sore and put
Stan out of a job again. The last I heard of him he was writing articles
on Why Young Men Fail, and making a success of it, because failing was
the one subject on which he was practical.

I simply mention Stan in passing as an example of the fact that it isn't
so much knowing a whole lot, as knowing a little and how to use it that
counts.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

                  +----------------------------+
                  |           No. 2            |
                  +----------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, at      |
                  |  the Union Stock Yards     |
                  |  in Chicago, to his son,   |
                  |  Pierrepont, at Harvard    |
                  |  University.               |
                  |                            |
                  |  Mr. Pierrepont's expense  |
                  |  account has just passed   |
                  |  under his father's eye,   |
                  |  and has furnished him     |
                  |  with a text for some      |
                  |  plain particularities.    |
                  +----------------------------+

                              II

                                             CHICAGO, May 4, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ The cashier has just handed me your expense account
for the month, and it fairly makes a fellow hump-shouldered to look it
over. When I told you that I wished you to get a liberal education, I
didn't mean that I wanted to buy Cambridge. Of course the bills won't
break me, but they will break you unless you are very, very careful.

I have noticed for the last two years that your accounts have been
growing heavier every month, but I haven't seen any signs of your taking
honors to justify the increased operating expenses; and that is bad
business--a good deal like feeding his weight in corn to a scalawag
steer that won't fat up.

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

The only sure way that a man can get rich quick is to have it given to
him or to inherit it. You are not going to get rich that way--at least,
not until after you have proved your ability to hold a pretty important
position with the firm; and, of course, there is just one place from
which a man can start for that position with Graham & Co. It doesn't
make any difference whether he is the son of the old man or of the
cellar boss--that place is the bottom. And the bottom in the office end
of this business is a seat at the mailing-desk, with eight dollars every
Saturday night.

I can't hand out any ready-made success to you. It would do you no good,
and it would do the house harm. There is plenty of room at the top here,
but there is no elevator in the building. Starting, as you do, with a
good education, you should be able to climb quicker than the fellow who
hasn't got it; but there's going to be a time when you begin at the
factory when you won't be able to lick stamps so fast as the other boys
at the desk. Yet the man who hasn't licked stamps isn't fit to write
letters. Naturally, that is the time when knowing whether the pie comes
before the ice-cream, and how to run an automobile isn't going to be of
any real use to you.

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

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

I know that when a lot of young men get off by themselves, some of them
think that recklessness with money brands them as good fellows, and that
carefulness is meanness. That is the one end of a college education
which is pure cussedness; and that is the one thing which makes nine
business men out of ten hesitate to send their boys off to school. But
on the other hand, that is the spot where a young man has the chance to
show that he is not a light-weight. I know that a good many people say I
am a pretty close proposition; that I make every hog which goes through
my packing-house give up more lard than the Lord gave him gross weight;
that I have improved on Nature to the extent of getting four hams out
of an animal which began life with two; but you have lived with me long
enough to know that my hand is usually in my pocket at the right time.

Now I want to say right here that the meanest man alive is the one who
is generous with money that he has not had to sweat for, and that the
boy who is a good fellow at some one else's expense would not work up
into first-class fertilizer. That same ambition to be known as a good
fellow has crowded my office with second-rate clerks, and they always
will be second-rate clerks. If you have it, hold it down until you have
worked for a year. Then, if your ambition runs to hunching up all week
over a desk, to earn eight dollars to blow on a few rounds of drinks for
the boys on Saturday night, there is no objection to your gratifying it;
for I will know that the Lord didn't intend you to be your own boss.

[Illustration: "_I have seen hundreds of boys go to Europe who didn't
bring back a great deal except a few trunks of badly fitting
clothes._"]

You know how I began--I was started off with a kick, but that proved a
kick up, and in the end every one since has lifted me a little bit higher.
I got two dollars a week, and slept under the counter, and you can bet I
knew just how many pennies there were in each of those dollars, and how
hard the floor was. That is what you have got to learn.

I remember when I was on the Lakes, our schooner was passing out through
the draw at Buffalo when I saw little Bill Riggs, the butcher, standing
up above me on the end of the bridge with a big roast of beef in his
basket. They were a little short in the galley on that trip, so I called
up to Bill and he threw the roast down to me. I asked him how much, and
he yelled back, "about a dollar." That was mighty good beef, and when we
struck Buffalo again on the return trip, I thought I would like a little
more of it. So I went up to Bill's shop and asked him for a piece of the
same. But this time he gave me a little roast, not near so big as the
other, and it was pretty tough and stringy. But when I asked him how
much, he answered "about a dollar." He simply didn't have any sense of
values, and that's the business man's sixth sense. Bill has always been
a big, healthy, hard-working man, but to-day he is very, very poor.

The Bills ain't all in the butcher business. I've got some of them right
now in my office, but they will never climb over the railing that
separates the clerks from the executives. Yet if they would put in half
the time thinking for the house that they give up to hatching out
reasons why they ought to be allowed to overdraw their salary accounts,
I couldn't keep them out of our private offices with a pole-ax, and I
wouldn't want to; for they could double their salaries and my profits in
a year. But I always lay it down as a safe proposition that the fellow
who has to break open the baby's bank toward the last of the week for
car-fare isn't going to be any Russell Sage when it comes to trading
with the old man's money. He'd punch my bank account as full of holes as
a carload of wild Texans would a fool stockman that they'd got in a
corner.

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

We've got an old steer out at the packing-house that stands around at
the foot of the runway leading up to the killing pens, looking for all
the world like one of the village fathers sitting on the cracker box
before the grocery--sort of sad-eyed, dreamy old cuss--always has two or
three straws from his cud sticking out of the corner of his mouth. You
never saw a steer that looked as if he took less interest in things. But
by and by the boys drive a bunch of steers toward him, or cows maybe, if
we're canning, and then you'll see Old Abe move off up that runway, sort
of beckoning the bunch after him with that wicked old stump of a tail of
his, as if there was something mighty interesting to steers at the top,
and something that every Texan and Colorado, raw from the prairies,
ought to have a look at to put a metropolitan finish on him. Those
steers just naturally follow along on up that runway and into the
killing pens. But just as they get to the top, Old Abe, someways, gets
lost in the crowd, and he isn't among those present when the gates are
closed and the real trouble begins for his new friends.

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

You needn't write me if you feel yourself getting them. The symptoms
will show in your expense account. Good-by; life's too short to write
letters and New York's calling me on the wire.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

                  +-------------------------------+
                  |             No. 3             |
                  +-------------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, at the     |
                  |  Union Stock Yards in         |
                  |  Chicago, to his son,         |
                  |  Pierrepont, at Harvard       |
                  |  University. Mr. Pierrepont   |
                  |  finds Cambridge to his       |
                  |  liking, and has suggested    |
                  |  that he take a post-graduate |
                  |  course to fill up some       |
                  |  gaps which he has found      |
                  |  in his education.            |
                  +-------------------------------+

                                                     June 1, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ No, I can't say that I think anything of your
post-graduate course idea. You're not going to be a poet or a professor,
but a packer, and the place to take a post-graduate course for that
calling is in the packing-house. Some men learn all they know from
books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all
theory; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough
about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world
a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it.

There's a chance for everything you have learned, from Latin to poetry,
in the packing business, though we don't use much poetry here except in
our street-car ads., and about the only time our products are given
Latin names is when the State Board of Health condemns them. So I think
you'll find it safe to go short a little on the frills of education; if
you want them bad enough you'll find a way to pick them up later, after
business hours.

The main thing is to get a start along right lines, and that is what I
sent you to college for. I didn't expect you to carry off all the
education in sight--I knew you'd leave a little for the next fellow.
But I wanted you to form good mental habits, just as I want you to have
clean, straight physical ones. Because I was run through a threshing
machine when I was a boy, and didn't begin to get the straw out of my
hair till I was past thirty, I haven't any sympathy with a lot of these
old fellows who go around bragging of their ignorance and saying that
boys don't need to know anything except addition and the "best policy"
brand of honesty.

We started in a mighty different world, and we were all ignorant
together. The Lord let us in on the ground floor, gave us corner lots,
and then started in to improve the adjacent property. We didn't have to
know fractions to figure out our profits. Now a merchant needs astronomy
to see them, and when he locates them they are out somewhere near the
fifth decimal place. There are sixteen ounces to the pound still, but
two of them are wrapping paper in a good many stores. And there're just
as many chances for a fellow as ever, but they're a little gun shy, and
you can't catch them by any such coarse method as putting salt on their
tails.

Thirty years ago, you could take an old muzzle-loader and knock over
plenty of ducks in the city limits, and Chicago wasn't Cook County then,
either. You can get them still, but you've got to go to Kankakee and
take a hammerless along. And when I started in the packing business it
was all straight sailing--no frills--just turning hogs into hog
meat--dry salt for the niggers down South and sugar-cured for the white
folks up North. Everything else was sausage, or thrown away. But when we
get through with a hog nowadays, he's scattered through a hundred
different cans and packages, and he's all accounted for. What we used to
throw away is our profit. It takes doctors, lawyers, engineers, poets,
and I don't know what, to run the business, and I reckon that
improvements which call for parsons will be creeping in next. Naturally,
a young man who expects to hold his own when he is thrown in with a lot
of men like these must be as clean and sharp as a hound's tooth, or some
other fellow's simply going to eat him up.

The first college man I ever hired was old John Durham's son, Jim. That
was a good many years ago when the house was a much smaller affair.
Jim's father had a lot of money till he started out to buck the universe
and corner wheat. And the boy took all the fancy courses and trimmings
at college. The old man was mighty proud of Jim. Wanted him to be a
literary fellow. But old Durham found out what every one learns who gets
his ambitions mixed up with number two red--that there's a heap of it
lying around loose in the country. The bears did quick work and kept the
cash wheat coming in so lively that one settling day half a dozen of us
had to get under the market to keep it from going to everlasting smash.

That day made young Jim a candidate for a job. It didn't take him long
to decide that the Lord would attend to keeping up the visible supply of
poetry, and that he had better turn his attention to the stocks of mess
pork. Next morning he was laying for me with a letter of introduction
when I got to the office, and when he found that I wouldn't have a
private secretary at any price, he applied for every other position on
the premises right down to office boy. I told him I was sorry, but I
couldn't do anything for him then; that we were letting men go, but I'd
keep him in mind, and so on. The fact was that I didn't think a fellow
with Jim's training would be much good, anyhow. But Jim hung on--said
he'd taken a fancy to the house, and wanted to work for it. Used to call
by about twice a week to find out if anything had turned up.

Finally, after about a month of this, he wore me down so that I stopped
him one day as he was passing me on the street. I thought I'd find out
if he really was so red-hot to work as he pretended to be; besides, I
felt that perhaps I hadn't treated the boy just right, as I had
delivered quite a jag of that wheat to his father myself.

"Hello, Jim," I called; "do you still want that job?"

"Yes, sir," he answered, quick as lightning.

"Well, I tell you how it is, Jim," I said, looking up at him--he was one
of those husky, lazy-moving six-footers--"I don't see any chance in the
office, but I understand they can use another good, strong man in one of
the loading gangs."

I thought that would settle Jim and let me out, for it's no joke lugging
beef, or rolling barrels and tierces a hundred yards or so to the cars.
But Jim came right back at me with, "Done. Who'll I report to?"

That sporty way of answering, as if he was closing a bet, made me surer
than ever that he was not cut out for a butcher. But I told him, and off
he started hot-foot to find the foreman. I sent word by another route to
see that he got plenty to do.

I forgot all about Jim until about three months later, when his name was
handed up to me for a new place and a raise in pay. It seemed that he
had sort of abolished his job. After he had been rolling barrels a
while, and the sport had ground down one of his shoulders a couple of
inches lower than the other, he got to scheming around for a way to make
the work easier, and he hit on an idea for a sort of overhead railroad
system, by which the barrels could be swung out of the storerooms and
run right along into the cars, and two or three men do the work of a
gang. It was just as I thought. Jim was lazy, but he had put the house
in the way of saving so much money that I couldn't fire him. So I raised
his salary, and made him an assistant timekeeper and checker. Jim kept
at this for three or four months, until his feet began to hurt him, I
guess, and then he was out of a job again. It seems he had heard
something of a new machine for registering the men, that did away with
most of the timekeepers except the fellows who watched the machines, and
he kept after the Superintendent until he got him to put them in. Of
course he claimed a raise again for effecting such a saving, and we just
had to allow it.

I was beginning to take an interest in Jim, so I brought him up into the
office and set him to copying circular letters. We used to send out a
raft of them to the trade. That was just before the general adoption of
typewriters, when they were still in the experimental stage. But Jim
hadn't been in the office plugging away at the letters for a month
before he had the writer's cramp, and began nosing around again. The
first thing I knew he was sicking the agents for the new typewriting
machine on to me, and he kept them pounding away until they had made me
give them a trial. Then it was all up with Mister Jim's job again. I
raised his salary without his asking for it this time, and put him out
on the road to introduce a new product that we were making--beef
extract.

Jim made two trips without selling enough to keep them working overtime
at the factory, and then he came into my office with a long story about
how we were doing it all wrong. Said we ought to go for the consumer by
advertising, and make the trade come to us, instead of chasing it up.

That was so like Jim that I just laughed at first; besides, that sort of
advertising was a pretty new thing then, and I was one of the old-timers
who didn't take any stock in it. But Jim just kept plugging away at me
between trips, until finally I took him off the road and told him to go
ahead and try it in a small way.

Jim pretty nearly scared me to death that first year. At last he had got
into something that he took an interest in--spending money--and he just
fairly wallowed in it. Used to lay awake nights, thinking up new ways of
getting rid of the old man's profits. And he found them. Seemed as if I
couldn't get away from Graham's Extract, and whenever I saw it I gagged,
for I knew it was costing me money that wasn't coming back; but every
time I started to draw in my horns Jim talked to me, and showed me where
there was a fortune waiting for me just around the corner.

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

Graham's Extract started out by being something that you could make
beef-tea out of--that was all. But before Jim had been fooling with it a
month he had got his girl to think up a hundred different ways in which
it could be used, and had advertised them all. It seemed there was
nothing you could cook that didn't need a dash of it. He kept me between
a chill and a sweat all the time. Sometimes, but not often, I just _had_
to grin at his foolishness. I remember one picture he got out showing
sixteen cows standing between something that looked like a letter-press,
and telling how every pound or so of Graham's Extract contained the
juice squeezed from a herd of steers. If an explorer started for the
North Pole, Jim would send him a case of Extract, and then advertise
that it was the great heat-maker for cold climates; and if some other
fellow started across Africa he sent _him_ a case, too, and advertised
what a bully drink it was served up with a little ice.

He broke out in a new place every day, and every time he broke out it
cost the house money. Finally, I made up my mind to swallow the loss,
and Mister Jim was just about to lose his job sure enough, when the
orders for Extract began to look up, and he got a reprieve; then he
began to make expenses, and he got a pardon; and finally a rush came
that left him high and dry in a permanent place. Jim was all right in
his way, but it was a new way, and I hadn't been broad-gauged enough to
see that it was a better way.

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

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

I see you've been elected President of your class. I'm glad the boys
aren't down on you, but while the most popular man in his class isn't
always a failure in business, being as popular as that takes up a heap
of time. I noticed, too, when you were home Easter, that you were
running to sporty clothes and cigarettes. There's nothing criminal about
either, but I don't hire sporty clerks at all, and the only part of the
premises on which cigarette smoking is allowed is the fertilizer
factory.

I simply mention this in passing. I have every confidence in your
ultimate good sense, and I guess you'll see the point without my
elaborating with a meat ax my reasons for thinking that you've had
enough college for the present.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

                  +-----------------------------+
                  |           No. 4             |
                  +-----------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, head     |
                  |  of the house of Graham     |
                  |  & Co., at the Union Stock  |
                  |  Yards in Chicago, to his   |
                  |  son, Pierrepont Graham,    |
                  |  at the Waldorf-Astoria,    |
                  |  in New York. Mr.           |
                  |  Pierrepont has suggested   |
                  |  the grand tour as a        |
                  |  proper finish to his       |
                  |  education.                 |
                  +-----------------------------+

                              IV

                                                    June 25, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ Your letter of the seventh twists around the point
a good deal like a setter pup chasing his tail. But I gather from it that
you want to spend a couple of months in Europe before coming on here and
getting your nose in the bull-ring. Of course, you are your own boss now
and you ought to be able to judge better than any one else how much time
you have to waste, but it seems to me, on general principles, that a
young man of twenty-two, who is physically and mentally sound, and who
hasn't got a dollar and has never earned one, can't be getting on
somebody's pay-roll too quick. And in this connection it is only fair to
tell you that I have instructed the cashier to discontinue your
allowance after July 15. That gives you two weeks for a vacation--enough
to make a sick boy well, or a lazy one lazier.

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

Some fellows leave the office at night and start out to whoop it up with
the boys, and some go home to sit up with their troubles--they're both
in bad company. They're the men who are always needing vacations, and
never getting any good out of them. What every man does need once a year
is a change of work--that is, if he has been curved up over a desk for
fifty weeks and subsisting on birds and burgundy, he ought to take to
fishing for a living and try bacon and eggs, with a little spring
water, for dinner. But coming from Harvard to the packing-house will
give you change enough this year to keep you in good trim, even if you
didn't have a fortnight's leeway to run loose.

You will always find it a safe rule to take a thing just as quick as it
is offered--especially a job. It is never easy to get one except when
you don't want it; but when you have to get work, and go after it with
a gun, you'll find it as shy as an old crow that every farmer in the
county has had a shot at.

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

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

Old Dick Stover, for whom I once clerked in Indiana, was the worst hand
at procrastinating that I ever saw. Dick was a powerful hearty eater,
and no one ever loved meal-time better, but he used to keep turning over
in bed mornings for just another wink and staving off getting up, until
finally his wife combined breakfast and dinner on him, and he only got
two meals a day. He was a mighty religious man, too, but he got to
putting off saying his prayers until after he was in bed, and then he
would keep passing them along until his mind was clear of worldly
things, and in the end he would drop off to sleep without saying them
at all. What between missing the Sunday morning service and never being
seen on his knees, the first thing Dick knew he was turned out of the
church. He had a pretty good business when I first went with him, but he
would keep putting off firing his bad clerks until they had lit out with
the petty cash; and he would keep putting off raising the salaries of
his good ones until his competitor had hired them away. Finally, he got
so that he wouldn't discount his bills, even when he had the money; and
when they came due he would give notes so as to keep from paying out his
cash a little longer. Running a business on those lines is, of course,
equivalent to making a will in favor of the sheriff and committing
suicide so that he can inherit. The last I heard of Dick he was
ninety-three years old and just about to die. That was ten years ago,
and I'll bet he's living yet. I simply mention Dick in passing as an
instance of how habits rule a man's life.

There is one excuse for every mistake a man can make, but only one. When
a fellow makes the same mistake twice he's got to throw up both hands
and own up to carelessness or cussedness. Of course, I knew that you
would make a fool of yourself pretty often when I sent you to college,
and I haven't been disappointed. But I expected you to narrow down the
number of combinations possible by making a different sort of a fool of
yourself every time. That is the important thing, unless a fellow has
too lively an imagination, or has none at all. You are bound to try this
European foolishness sooner or later, but if you will wait a few years,
you will approach it in an entirely different spirit--and you will come
back with a good deal of respect for the people who have sense enough to
stay at home.

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

I piece out from your letter that you expect a few months on the other
side will sort of put a polish on you. I don't want to seem pessimistic,
but I have seen hundreds of boys graduate from college and go over with
the same idea, and they didn't bring back a great deal except a few
trunks of badly fitting clothes. Seeing the world is like charity--it
covers a multitude of sins, and, like charity, it ought to begin at
home.

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

I went to Europe once myself. I was pretty raw when I left Chicago, and
I was pretty sore when I got back. Coming and going I was simply sick.
In London, for the first time in my life, I was taken for an easy
thing. Every time I went into a store there was a bull movement. The
clerks all knocked off their regular work and started in to mark up
prices.

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

The fellow who tried to fit me out with a coat-of-arms didn't find me so
easy. I picked mine when I first went into business for myself--a
charging steer--and it's registered at Washington. It's my trade-mark,
of course, and that's the only coat-of-arms an American merchant has any
business with. It's penetrated to every quarter of the globe in the last
twenty years, and every soldier in the world has carried it--in his
knapsack.

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

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

I simply mention these things in a general way. I have no fears for you
after you've been at work for a few years, and have struck an average
between the packing-house and Harvard; then if you want to graze over a
wider range it can't hurt you. But for the present you will find
yourself pretty busy trying to get into the winning class.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

                  +------------------------------+
                  |            No. 5             |
                  +------------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, head      |
                  |  of the house of Graham &    |
                  |  Co., at the Union Stock     |
                  |  Yards in Chicago, to his    |
                  |  son, Pierrepont Graham,     |
                  |  at Lake Moosgatchemawamuc,  |
                  |  in the Maine woods. Mr.     |
                  |  Pierrepont has written to   |
                  |  his father withdrawing      |
                  |  his suggestion.             |
                  +------------------------------+

                              V

                                                     July 7, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ Yours of the fourth has the right ring, and it
says more to the number of words used than any letter that I have ever
received from you. I remember reading once that some fellows use
language to conceal thought; but it's been my experience that a good
many more use it _instead_ of thought.

A business man's conversation should be regulated by fewer and simpler
rules than any other function of the human animal. They are:

Have something to say.

Say it.

Stop talking.

Beginning before you know what you want to say and keeping on after you
have said it lands a merchant in a lawsuit or the poorhouse, and the
first is a short cut to the second. I maintain a legal department here,
and it costs a lot of money, but it's to keep me from going to law.

It's all right when you are calling on a girl or talking with friends
after dinner to run a conversation like a Sunday-school excursion, with
stops to pick flowers; but in the office your sentences should be the
shortest distance possible between periods. Cut out the introduction and
the peroration, and stop before you get to secondly. You've got to
preach short sermons to catch sinners; and deacons won't believe they
need long ones themselves. Give fools the first and women the last word.
The meat's always in the middle of the sandwich. Of course, a little
butter on either side of it doesn't do any harm if it's intended for a
man who likes butter.

Remember, too, that it's easier to look wise than to talk wisdom. Say
less than the other fellow and listen more than you talk; for when a
man's listening he isn't telling on himself and he's flattering the
fellow who is. Give most men a good listener and most women enough
note-paper and they'll tell all they know. Money talks--but not unless
its owner has a loose tongue, and then its remarks are always offensive.
Poverty talks, too, but nobody wants to hear what it has to say.

I simply mention these things in passing because I'm afraid you're apt
to be the fellow who's doing the talking; just as I'm a little afraid
that you're sometimes like the hungry drummer at the dollar-a-day
house--inclined to kill your appetite by eating the cake in the centre
of the table before the soup comes on.

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

You've got to handle the first year of your business life about the way
you would a trotting horse. Warm up a little before going to the
post--not enough to be in a sweat, but just enough to be limber and
eager. Never start off at a gait that you can't improve on, but move
along strong and well in hand to the quarter. Let out a notch there, but
take it calm enough up to the half not to break, and hard enough not to
fall back into the ruck. At the three-quarters you ought to be going
fast enough to poke your nose out of the other fellow's dust, and
running like the Limited in the stretch. Keep your eyes to the front all
the time, and you won't be so apt to shy at the little things by the
side of the track. Head up, tail over the dashboard--that's the way the
winners look in the old pictures of Maud S. and Dexter and Jay-Eye-See.
And that's the way I want to see you swing by the old man at the end of
the year, when we hoist the numbers of the fellows who are good enough
to promote and pick out the salaries which need a little sweetening.

I've always taken a good deal of stock in what you call "Blood-will-tell"
if you're a Methodist, or "Heredity" if you're a Unitarian; and I don't
want you to come along at this late day and disturb my religious beliefs.
A man's love for his children and his pride are pretty badly snarled up
in this world, and he can't always pick them apart. I think a heap of you
and a heap of the house, and I want to see you get along well together.
To do that you must start right. It's just as necessary to make a good
first impression in business as in courting. You'll read a good deal about
"love at first sight" in novels, and there may be something in it for all
I know; but I'm dead certain there's no such thing as love at first sight
in business. A man's got to keep company a long time, and come early and
stay late and sit close, before he can get a girl or a job worth having.
There's nothing comes without calling in this world, and after you've
called you've generally got to go and fetch it yourself.

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

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

I remember when I was selling goods for old Josh Jennings, back in the
sixties, and had rounded up about a thousand in a savings-bank--a mighty
hard thousand, that came a dollar or so at a time, and every dollar with
a little bright mark where I had bit it--I roomed with a dry-goods clerk
named Charlie Chase. Charlie had a hankering to be a rich man; but
somehow he could never see any connection between that hankering and his
counter, except that he'd hint to me sometimes about an heiress who used
to squander her father's money shamefully for the sake of having Charlie
wait on her. But when it came to getting rich outside the dry-goods
business and getting rich in a hurry, Charlie was the man.

Along about Tuesday night--he was paid on Saturday--he'd stay at home
and begin to scheme. He'd commence at eight o'clock and start a
magazine, maybe, and before midnight he'd be turning away subscribers
because his presses couldn't print a big enough edition. Or perhaps he
wouldn't feel literary that night, and so he'd invent a system for
speculating in wheat and go on pyramiding his purchases till he'd made
the best that Cheops did look like a five-cent plate of ice cream. All
he ever needed was a few hundred for a starter, and to get that he'd
decide to let me in on the ground floor. I want to say right here that
whenever any one offers to let you in on the ground floor it's a pretty
safe rule to take the elevator to the roof garden. I never exactly
refused to lend Charlie the capital he needed, but we generally
compromised on half a dollar next morning, when he was in a hurry to
make the store to keep from getting docked.

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

The swamps are full of razor-backs like Charlie, fellows who'd rather
make a million a night in their heads than five dollars a day in cash.
I have always found it cheaper to lend a man of that build a little money
than to hire him. As a matter of fact, I have never known a fellow who
was smart enough to think for the house days and for himself nights. A
man who tries that is usually a pretty poor thinker, and he isn't much
good to either; but if there's any choice the house gets the worst of
it.

I simply mention these little things in a general way. If you can take
my word for some of them you are going to save yourself a whole lot of
trouble. There are others which I don't speak of because life is too
short and because it seems to afford a fellow a heap of satisfaction
to pull the trigger for himself to see if it is loaded; and a lesson
learned at the muzzle has the virtue of never being forgotten.

You report to Milligan at the yards at eight sharp on the fifteenth.
You'd better figure on being here on the fourteenth, because Milligan's
a pretty touchy Irishman, and I may be able to give you a point or two
that will help you to keep on his mellow side. He's apt to feel a little
sore at taking on in his department a man whom he hasn't passed on.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

                  +-----------------------------+
                  |            No. 6            |
                  +-----------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, en route |
                  |  to Texas, to Pierrepont    |
                  |  Graham, care of Graham &   |
                  |  Co., Union Stock Yards,    |
                  |  Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont    |
                  |  has, entirely without      |
                  |  intention, caused a little |
                  |  confusion in the mails,    |
                  |  and it has come to his     |
                  |  father's notice in the     |
                  |  course of business.        |
                  +-----------------------------+

                              VI

                             PRIVATE CAR PARNASSUS, Aug. 15, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ Perhaps it's just as well that I had to hurry last
night to make my train, and so had no time to tell you some things that
are laying mighty heavy on my mind this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

A man can't have his head pumped out like a vacuum pan, or stuffed full
of odds and ends like a bologna sausage, and do his work right. It
doesn't make any difference how mean and trifling the thing he's doing
may seem, that's the big thing and the only thing for him just then.
Business is like oil--it won't mix with anything but business.

You can resolve everything in the world, even a great fortune, into
atoms. And the fundamental principles which govern the handling of
postage stamps and of millions are exactly the same. They are the common
law of business, and the whole practice of commerce is founded on them.
They are so simple that a fool can't learn them; so hard that a lazy man
won't.

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

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

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

I remember when I was a boy, we used to have a pretty lively
camp-meeting every summer, and Elder Hoover, who was accounted a
powerful exhorter in our parts, would wrastle with the sinners and the
backsliders. There was one old chap in the town--Bill Budlong--who took
a heap of pride in being the simon pure cuss. Bill was always the last
man to come up to the mourners' bench at the camp-meeting and the first
one to backslide when it was over. Used to brag around about what a
hold Satan had on him and how his sin was the original brand, direct
from Adam, put up in cans to keep, and the can-opener lost. Doc Hoover
would get the whole town safe in the fold and then have to hold extra
meetings for a couple of days to snake in that miserable Bill; but, in
the end, he always got religion and got it hard. For a month or two
afterward, he'd make the chills run down the backs of us children in
prayer-meeting, telling how he had probably been the triflingest and
orneriest man alive before he was converted. Then, along toward
hog-killing time, he'd backslide, and go around bragging that he was
standing so close to the mouth of the pit that his whiskers smelt of
brimstone.

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

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

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

It isn't the little extra money that you may make for the house by
learning the fundamental business virtues which counts so much as it is
the effect that it has on your character and that of those about you,
and especially on the judgment of the old man when he's casting around
for the fellow to fill the vacancy just ahead of you. He's pretty apt to
pick some one who keeps separate ledger accounts for work and for fun,
who gives the house sixteen ounces to the pound, and, on general
principles, to pass by the one who is late at the end where he ought to
be early, and early at the end where he ought to be late.

I simply mention these things in passing, but, frankly, I am afraid that
you have a streak of the Bill in you; and you can't be a good clerk, let
alone a partner, until you get it out. I try not to be narrow when I'm
weighing up a young fellow, and to allow for soakage and leakage, and
then to throw in a little for good feeling; but I don't trade with a
man whom I find deliberately marking up the weights on me.

This is a fine country we're running through, but it's a pity that it
doesn't raise more hogs. It seems to take a farmer a long time to learn
that the best way to sell his corn is on the hoof.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

P.S. I just had to allow Donnelly his claim on those hams, though I was
dead sure our weights were right, and it cost the house sixty dollars.
But your fool letter took all the snap out of our argument. I get hot
every time I think of it.

                  +------------------------------+
                  |             No. 7            |
                  +------------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, at the    |
                  |  Omaha Branch of Graham &    |
                  |  Co., to Pierrepont Graham,  |
                  |  at the Union Stock Yards,   |
                  |  Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont     |
                  |  hasn't found the methods    |
                  |  of the worthy Milligan      |
                  |  altogether to his liking,   |
                  |  and he has commented        |
                  |  rather freely on them.      |
                  +------------------------------+

                              VII

                                         OMAHA, September 1, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ Yours of the 30th ultimo strikes me all wrong.
I don't like to hear you say that you can't work under Milligan or any
other man, for it shows a fundamental weakness. And then, too, the house
isn't interested in knowing how you like your boss, but in how he likes
you.

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

But all that apart, you want to get it firmly fixed in your mind that
you're going to have a Milligan over you all your life, and if it isn't
a Milligan it will be a Jones or a Smith, and the chances are that
you'll find them both harder to get along with than this old fellow. And
if it isn't Milligan or Jones or Smith, and you ain't a butcher, but a
parson or a doctor, or even the President of the United States, it'll be
a way-back deacon, or the undertaker, or the machine. There isn't any
such thing as being your own boss in this world unless you're a tramp,
and then there's the constable.

Like the old man if you can, but give him no cause to dislike you. Keep
your self-respect at any cost, and your upper lip stiff at the same
figure. Criticism can properly come only from above, and whenever you
discover that your boss is no good you may rest easy that the man who
pays his salary shares your secret. Learn to give back a bit from the
base-burner, to let the village fathers get their feet on the fender and
the sawdust box in range, and you'll find them making a little room for
you in turn. Old men have tender feet, and apologies are poor salve for
aching corns. Remember that when you're in the right you can afford to
keep your temper, and that when you're in the wrong you can't afford to
lose it.

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

Of course, you want to be sure of your natural history facts and learn
to distinguish between a cow that's a kicker, but whose intentions are
good if she's approached with proper respect, and a hooker, who is
vicious on general principles, and any way you come at her. There's
never any use fooling with an animal of that sort, brute or human. The
only safe place is the other side of the fence or the top of the nearest
tree.

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

When I was clerking in Missouri, a fellow named Jeff Hankins moved down
from Wisconsin and bought a little clearing just outside the town. Jeff
was a good talker, but a bad listener, and so we learned a heap about
how things were done in Wisconsin, but he didn't pick up much
information about the habits of our Missouri fauna. When it came to
cows, he had had a liberal education and he made out all right, but by
and by it got on to ploughing time and Jeff naturally bought a mule--a
little moth-eaten cuss, with sad, dreamy eyes and droopy, wiggly-woggly
ears that swung in a circle as easy as if they ran on ball-bearings. Her
owner didn't give her a very good character, but Jeff was too busy telling
how much he knew about horses to pay much attention to what anybody was
saying about mules. So finally the seller turned her loose in Jeff's lot,
told him he wouldn't have any trouble catching her if he approached her
right, and hurried off out of range.

Next morning at sunup Jeff picked out a bridle and started off whistling
Buffalo Gals--he was a powerful pretty whistler and could do the Mocking
Bird with variations--to catch the mule and begin his plowing. The
animal was feeding as peaceful as a water-color picture, and she didn't
budge; but when Jeff began to get nearer, her ears dropped back along
her neck as if they had lead in them. He knew that symptom and so he
closed up kind of cautious, aiming for her at right angles and gurgling,
"Muley, muley, here muley; that's a good muley," sort of soothing and
caressing-like. Still she didn't stir and Jeff got right up to her and
put one arm over her back and began to reach forward with the bridle,
when something happened. He never could explain just what it was, but we
judged from the marks on his person that the mule had reached forward
and kicked the seat of his trousers with one of her prehensile hind
feet; and had reached back and caught him on the last button of his
waistcoat with one of her limber fore feet; and had twisted around her
elastic neck and bit off a mouthful of his hair. When Jeff regained
consciousness, he reckoned that the only really safe way to approach a
mule was to drop on it from a balloon.

I simply mention this little incident as an example of the fact that
there are certain animals with which the Lord didn't intend white men to
fool. And you will find that, as a rule, the human varieties of them are
not the fellows who go for you rough-shod, like Milligan, when you're
wrong. It's when you come across one of those gentlemen who have more
oil in their composition than any two-legged animal has a right to have,
that you should be on the lookout for concealed deadly weapons.

I don't mean that you should distrust a man who is affable and
approachable, but you want to learn to distinguish between him and one
who is too affable and too approachable. The adverb makes the difference
between a good and a bad fellow. The bunco men aren't all at the county
fair, and they don't all operate with the little shells and the elusive
pea. When a packer has learned all that there is to learn about
quadrupeds, he knows only one-eighth of his business; the other
seven-eighths, and the important seven-eighths, has to do with the study
of bipeds.

I dwell on this because I am a little disappointed that you should have
made such a mistake in sizing up Milligan. He isn't the brightest man in
the office, but he is loyal to me and to the house, and when you have
been in business as long as I have you will be inclined to put a pretty
high value on loyalty. It is the one commodity that hasn't any market
value, and it's the one that you can't pay too much for. You can trust
any number of men with your money, but mighty few with your reputation.
Half the men who are with the house on pay day are against it the other
six.

A good many young fellows come to me looking for jobs, and start in by
telling me what a mean house they have been working for; what a cuss to
get along with the senior partner was; and how little show a bright,
progressive clerk had with him. I never get very far with a critter of
that class, because I know that he wouldn't like me or the house if he
came to work for us.

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

Just one word before I close, as old Doc Hoover used to say, when he was
coming into the stretch, but still a good ways off from the benediction.
I have noticed that you are inclined to be a little chesty and starchy
around the office. Of course, it's good business, when a fellow hasn't
much behind his forehead, to throw out his chest and attract attention
to his shirt-front. But as you begin to meet the men who have done
something that makes them worth meeting you will find that there are no
"keep off the grass" or "beware of the dog" signs around their premises,
and that they don't motion to the orchestra to play slow music while
they talk.

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

We are coming home from here. I am a little disappointed in the showing
that this house has been making. Pound for pound it is not getting
nearly so much out of its hogs as we are in Chicago. I don't know just
where the leak is, but if they don't do better next month I am coming
back here with a shotgun, and there's going to be a pretty heavy
mortality among our head men.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

                  +------------------------------+
                  |            No. 8             |
                  +------------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, at Hot    |
                  |  Springs, Arkansas, to his   |
                  |  son, Pierrepont, at the     |
                  |  Union Stock Yards in        |
                  |  Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont     |
                  |  has just been promoted      |
                  |  from the mailing to the     |
                  |  billing desk and, in        |
                  |  consequence, his father     |
                  |  is feeling rather "mellow"  |
                  |  toward him.                 |
                  +------------------------------+

                              VIII

                                    HOT SPRINGS, January 15, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ They've run me through the scalding vats here till
they've pretty nearly taken all the hair off my hide, but that or
something else has loosened up my joints so that they don't squeak any
more when I walk. The doctor says he'll have my rheumatism cured in
thirty days, so I guess you can expect me home in about a fortnight. For
he's the breed of doctor that is always two weeks ahead of his patients'
condition when they're poor, and two weeks behind it when they're rich.
He calls himself a specialist, which means that it costs me ten dollars
every time he has a look in at my tongue, against two that I would pay
the family doctor for gratifying his curiosity. But I guess this
specialist business is about the only outlet for marketing the surplus
of young doctors.

Reminds me of the time when we were piling up canned corned beef in
stock faster than people would eat it, and a big drought happened along
in Texas and began driving the canners in to the packing-house quicker
than we could tuck them away in tin. Jim Durham tried to "stimulate the
consumption," as he put it, by getting out a nice little booklet called,
"A Hundred Dainty Dishes from a Can," and telling how to work off corned
beef on the family in various disguises; but, after he had schemed out
ten different combinations, the other ninety turned out to be corned-beef
hash. So that was no use.

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

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

But that isn't what I started out to say. I want to tell you that I was
very, very glad to learn from your letter that you had been promoted to
the billing desk. I have felt all along that when you got a little of
the nonsense tried out of you there would be a residue of common-sense,
and I am glad to have your boss back up my judgment. There's two things
you just naturally don't expect from human nature--that the widow's
tombstone estimate of the departed, on which she is trying to convince
the neighbors against their better judgment that he went to Heaven, and
the father's estimate of the son, on which he is trying to pass him
along into a good salary, will be conservative.

I had that driven into my mind and spiked down when I hired the widow's
son a few years ago. His name was Clarence--Clarence St. Clair
Hicks--and his father used to keep books for me when he wasn't picking
the winners at Washington Park or figuring out the batting averages of
the Chicagos. He was one of those quick men who always have their books
posted up half an hour before closing time for three weeks of the month,
and spend the evenings of the fourth hunting up the eight cents that
they are out on the trial balance. When he died his wife found that his
life insurance had lapsed the month before, and so she brought Clarence
down to the office and asked me to give him a job.

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

I couldn't just reconcile those statements with Clarence's face, but I
accepted him at par and had him passed along to the head errand boy. His
mother cried a little when she saw him marched off, and asked me to see
that he was treated kindly and wasn't bullied by the bigger boys,
because he had been "raised a pet."

A number of unusual things happened in the offices that morning, and the
head office boy thought Clarence might be able to explain some of them,
but he had an alibi ready every time--even when a bookkeeper found the
vault filled with cigarette smoke and Clarence in it hunting for
something he couldn't describe. But as he was a new boy, no one was
disposed to bear down on him very hard, so his cigarettes were taken
away from him and he was sent back to his bench with a warning that he
had used up all his explanations.

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

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

As far as we could learn from Willie when he came out of his
convulsions, the boys had been very polite to him and had insisted on
his joining in a new game which Clarence had just invented, called
playing pig-sticker. And, because he was company, Clarence told him that
he could be the pig. Willie didn't know just what being the pig meant,
but, as he told his father, it didn't sound very nice and he was afraid
he wouldn't like it. So he tried to pass along the honor to some one
else, but Clarence insisted that it was "hot stuff to be the pig," and
before Willie could rightly judge what was happening to him, one end of
a rope had been tied around his left ankle and the other end had been
passed over a transom bar, and he was dangling headforemost in the air,
while Clarence threatened his jugular with a lath sword. That was when
he let out the yell which brought his father and me on the jump and
scattered the boys all over the stock yards.

Willie's father canceled his bologna contract and marched off muttering
something about "degrading surroundings brutalizing the young;" and
Clarence's mother wrote me that I was a bad old man who had held her
husband down all his life and now wouldn't give her son a show. For,
naturally, after that little incident, I had told the boy who had been
raised a pet that he had better go back to the menagerie.

I simply mention Clarence in passing as an instance of why I am a little
slow to trust my judgment on my own. I have always found that, whenever
I thought a heap of anything I owned, there was nothing like getting the
other fellow's views expressed in figures; and the other fellow is
usually a pessimist when he's buying. The lady on the dollar is the only
woman who hasn't any sentiment in her make-up. And if you really want a
look at the solid facts of a thing you must strain off the sentiment
first.

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

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

Boys are a good deal like the pups that fellows sell on street
corners--they don't always turn out as represented. You buy a likely
setter pup and raise a spotted coach dog from it, and the promising son
of an honest butcher is just as like as not to turn out a poet or a
professor. I want to say in passing that I have no real prejudice
against poets, but I believe that, if you're going to be a Milton,
there's nothing like being a mute, inglorious one, as some fellow who
was a little sore on the poetry business once put it. Of course, a
packer who understands something about the versatility of cottonseed
oil need never turn down orders for lard because the run of hogs is
light, and a father who understands human nature can turn out an
imitation parson from a boy whom the Lord intended to go on the Board of
Trade. But on general principles it's best to give your cottonseed oil a
Latin name and to market it on its merits, and to let your boy follow
his bent, even if it leads him into the wheat pit. If a fellow has got
poetry in him it's bound to come out sooner or later in the papers or
the street cars; and the longer you keep it bottled up the harder it
comes, and the longer it takes the patient to recover. There's no easier
way to cure foolishness than to give a man leave to be foolish. And the
only way to show a fellow that he's chosen the wrong business is to let
him try it. If it really is the wrong thing you won't have to argue with
him to quit, and if it isn't you haven't any right to.

Speaking of bull-pups that turned out to be terriers naturally calls to
mind the case of my old friend Jeremiah Simpkins' son. There isn't a
solider man in the Boston leather trade than Jeremiah, nor a bigger
scamp that the law can't touch than his son Ezra. There isn't an ounce
of real meanness in Ezra's whole body, but he's just naturally and
unintentionally a maverick. When he came out of college his father
thought that a few years' experience in the hide department of Graham &
Co. would be a good thing for him before he tackled the leather
business. So I wrote to send him on and I would give him a job,
supposing, of course, that I was getting a yearling of the steady, old,
reliable Simpkins strain.

I was a little uneasy when Ezra reported, because he didn't just look
as if he had had a call to leather. He was a tall, spare New Englander,
with one of those knobby foreheads which has been pushed out by the
overcrowding of the brain, or bulged by the thickening of the skull,
according as you like or dislike the man. His manners were easy or
familiar by the same standard. He told me right at the start that, while
he didn't know just what he wanted to do, he was dead sure that it
wasn't the leather business. It seemed that he had said the same thing
to his father and that the old man had answered, "Tut, tut," and told
him to forget it and to learn hides.

Simpkins learned all that he wanted to know about the packing industry
in thirty days, and I learned all that I wanted to know about Ezra in
the same time. Pork-packing seemed to be the only thing that he wasn't
interested in. I got his resignation one day just five minutes before
the one which I was having written out for him was ready; for I will do
Simpkins the justice to say that there was nothing slow about him. He
and his father split up, temporarily, over it, and, of course, it cost
me the old man's trade and friendship. I want to say right here that the
easiest way in the world to make enemies is to hire friends.

I lost sight of Simpkins for a while, and then he turned up at the
office one morning as friendly and familiar as ever. Said he was a
reporter and wanted to interview me on the December wheat deal. Of
course, I wouldn't talk on that, but I gave him a little fatherly
advice--told him he would sleep in a hall bedroom all his life if he
didn't quit his foolishness and go back to his father, though I didn't
really believe it. He thanked me and went off and wrote a column about
what I might have said about December wheat, and somehow gave the
impression that I had said it.

The next I heard of Simpkins he was dead. The Associated Press
dispatches announced it, the Cuban Junta confirmed it, and last of all,
a long dispatch from Simpkins himself detailed the circumstances leading
up to the "atrocity," as the headlines in his paper called it.

I got a long wire from Ezra's father asking me to see the managing editor
and get at the facts for him. It seemed that the paper had thought a heap
of Simpkins, and that he had been sent out to Cuba as a correspondent, and
stationed with the Insurgent army. Simpkins in Cuba had evidently lived up
to the reputation of Simpkins in Chicago. When there was any news he sent
it, and when there wasn't he just made news and sent that along.

The first word of his death had come in his own letter, brought across
on a filibustering steamer and wired on from Jacksonville. It told, with
close attention to detail--something he had learned since he left
me--how he had strayed away from the little band of insurgents with
which he had been out scouting and had blundered into the Spanish lines.
He had been promptly made a prisoner, and, despite his papers proving
his American citizenship, and the nature of his job, and the red cross
on his sleeve, he had been tried by drumhead court martial and sentenced
to be shot at dawn. All this he had written out, and then, that his
account might be complete, he had gone on and imagined his own
execution. This was written in a sort of pigeon, or perhaps you would
call it black Spanish, English, and let on to be the work of the
eyewitness to whom Simpkins had confided his letter. He had been the
sentry over the prisoner, and for a small bribe in hand and the promise
of a larger one from the paper, he had turned his back on Simpkins while
he wrote out the story, and afterward had deserted and carried it to the
Cuban lines.

The account ended: "Then, as the order to fire was given by the
lieutenant, Señor Simpkins raised his eyes toward Heaven and cried: 'I
protest in the name of my American citizenship!'" At the end of the
letter, and not intended for publication, was scrawled: "This is a bully
scoop for you, boys, but it's pretty tough on me. Good-by. Simpkins."

The managing editor dashed a tear from his eye when he read this to me,
and gulped a little as he said: "I can't help it; he was such a d----d
thoughtful boy. Why, he even remembered to inclose descriptions for the
pictures!"

Simpkins' last story covered the whole of the front page and three
columns of the second, and it just naturally sold cords of papers. His
editor demanded that the State Department take it up, though the
Spaniards denied the execution or any previous knowledge of any such
person as this Señor Simpkins. That made another page in the paper, of
course, and then they got up a memorial service, which was good for
three columns. One of those fellows that you can find in every office,
who goes around and makes the boys give up their lunch money to buy
flowers for the deceased aunt of the cellar boss' wife, managed to
collect twenty dollars among our clerks, and they sent a floral
notebook, with "Gone to Press," done in blue immortelles on the cover,
as their "tribute."

I put on a plug hat and attended the service out of respect for his
father. But I had hardly got back to the office before I received a wire
from Jamaica, reading: "Cable your correspondent here let me have
hundred. Notify father all hunk. Keep it dark from others. Simpkins."

I kept it dark and Ezra came back to life by easy stages and in such a
way as not to attract any special attention to himself. He managed to
get the impression around that he'd been snatched from the jaws of death
by a rescue party at the last moment. The last I heard of him he was in
New York and drawing ten thousand a year, which was more than he could
have worked up to in the leather business in a century.

Fifty or a hundred years ago, when there was good money in poetry, a man
with Simpkins' imagination would naturally have been a bard, as I
believe they used to call the top-notchers; and, once he was turned
loose to root for himself, he instinctively smelled out the business
where he could use a little poetic license and made a hit in it.

When a pup has been born to point partridges there's no use trying to
run a fox with him. I was a little uncertain about you at first, but I
guess the Lord intended you to hunt with the pack. Get the scent in your
nostrils and keep your nose to the ground, and don't worry too much
about the end of the chase. The fun of the thing's in the run and not in
the finish.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

                  +-----------------------------+
                  |           No. 9             |
                  +-----------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, at Hot   |
                  |  Springs, Arkansas, to his  |
                  |  son, Pierrepont, at the    |
                  |  Union Stock Yards in       |
                  |  Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont    |
                  |  has been investing more    |
                  |  heavily in roses than his  |
                  |  father thinks his means    |
                  |  warrant, and he tries to   |
                  |  turn his thoughts to       |
                  |  staple groceries.          |
                  +-----------------------------+

                              IX

                                    HOT SPRINGS, January 30, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ I knew right off that I had made a mistake when I
opened the inclosed and saw that it was a bill for fifty-two dollars,
"for roses sent, as per orders, to Miss Mabel Dashkam." I don't just
place Miss Dashkam, but if she's the daughter of old Job Dashkam, on the
open Board, I should say, on general principles, that she was a fine
girl to let some other fellow marry. The last time I saw her, she
inventoried about $10,000 as she stood--allowing that her diamonds would
scratch glass--and that's more capital than any woman has a right to tie
up on her back, I don't care how rich her father is. And Job's fortune
is one of that brand which foots up to a million in the newspapers and
leaves the heirs in debt to the lawyers who settle the estate.

Of course I've never had any real experience in this sparking business,
except with your Ma; but I've watched from the other side of the fence
while a heap of fellows were getting it, and I should say that marrying
a woman like Mabel Dashkam would be the first step toward becoming a
grass widower. I'll bet if you'll tell her you're making twelve a week
and ain't going to get any more till you earn it, you'll find that you
can't push within a mile of her even on a Soo ice-breaker. She's one of
those women with a heart like a stock-ticker--it doesn't beat over
anything except money.

Of course you're in no position yet to think of being engaged even, and
that's why I'm a little afraid that you may be planning to get married.
But a twelve-dollar clerk, who owes fifty-two dollars for roses, needs a
keeper more than a wife. I want to say right here that there always
comes a time to the fellow who blows fifty-two dollars at a lick on
roses when he thinks how many staple groceries he could have bought
with the money. After all, there's no fool like a young fool, because
in the nature of things he's got a long time to live.

I suppose I'm fanning the air when I ask you to be guided by my judgment
in this matter, because, while a young fellow will consult his father
about buying a horse, he's cock-sure of himself when it comes to picking
a wife. Marriages may be made in Heaven, but most engagements are made
in the back parlor with the gas so low that a fellow doesn't really get
a square look at what he's taking. While a man doesn't see much of a
girl's family when he's courting, he's apt to see a good deal of it when
he's housekeeping; and while he doesn't marry his wife's father, there's
nothing in the marriage vow to prevent the old man from borrowing money
of him, and you can bet if he's old Job Dashkam he'll do it. A man can't
pick his own mother, but he can pick his son's mother, and when he
chooses a father-in-law who plays the bucket shops, he needn't be
surprised if his own son plays the races.

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

While you are at it, there's nothing like picking out a good-looking
wife, because even the handsomest woman looks homely sometimes, and so
you get a little variety; but a homely one can only look worse than
usual. Beauty is only skin deep, but that's deep enough to satisfy any
reasonable man. (I want to say right here that to get any sense out of a
proverb I usually find that I have to turn it wrong side out.) Then,
too, if a fellow's bound to marry a fool, and a lot of men have to if
they're going to hitch up into a well-matched team, there's nothing like
picking a good-looking one.

I simply mention these things in a general way, because it seems to me,
from the gait at which you're starting off, that you'll likely find
yourself roped and branded any day, without quite knowing how it
happened, and I want you to understand that the girl who marries you for
my money is getting a package of green goods in more ways than one. I
think, though, if you really understood what marrying on twelve a week
meant, you would have bought a bedroom set instead of roses with that
fifty-two you owe.

Speaking of marrying the old man's money by proxy naturally takes me
back to my old town in Missouri and the case of Chauncey Witherspoon
Hoskins. Chauncey's father was the whole village, barring the railroad
station and the saloon, and, of course, Chauncey thought that he was
something of a pup himself. So he was, but not just the kind that
Chauncey thought he was. He stood about five foot three in his pumps,
had a nice pinky complexion, pretty wavy hair, and a curly mustache. All
he needed was a blue ribbon around his neck to make you call, "Here,
Fido," when he came into the room.

Still I believe he must have been pretty popular with the ladies,
because I can't think of him to this day without wanting to punch his
head. At the church sociables he used to hop around among them, chipping
and chirping like a dicky-bird picking up seed; and he was a great hand
to play the piano, and sing saddish, sweetish songs to them. Always said
the smooth thing and said it easy. Never had to choke and swallow to
fetch it up. Never stepped through his partner's dress when he began to
dance, or got flustered when he brought her refreshments and poured the
coffee in her lap to cool instead of in the saucer. We boys who
couldn't walk across the floor without feeling that our pants had hiked
up till they showed our feet to the knees, and that we were carrying a
couple of canvased hams where our hands ought to be, didn't like him;
but the girls did. You can trust a woman's taste on everything except
men; and it's mighty lucky that she slips up there or we'd pretty nigh
all be bachelors. I might add that you can't trust a man's taste on
women, either, and that's pretty lucky, too, because there are a good
many old maids in the world as it is.

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

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

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

Chauncey worked along these lines until he was twenty-four, and then he
made a mistake. Most of the girls that he had grown up with had married
off, and while he was waiting for a new lot to come along, he began to
shine up to the widow Sharpless, a powerful, well-preserved woman of
forty or thereabouts, who had been born with her eye-teeth cut. He
found her uncommon sympathetic. And when Chauncey finally came out of
his trance he was the stepfather of the widow's four children.

She was very kind to Chauncey, and treated him like one of her own sons;
but she was very, very firm. There was no gallivanting off alone, and
when they went out in double harness strangers used to annoy him
considerable by patting him on the head and saying to his wife: "What a
bright-looking chap your son is, Mrs. Hoskins!"

She was almost seventy when Chauncey buried her a while back, and they
say that he began to take notice again on the way home from the funeral.
Anyway, he crowded his mourning into sixty days--and I reckon there was
plenty of room in them to hold all his grief without stretching--and his
courting into another sixty. And four months after date he presented his
matrimonial papers for acceptance. Said he was tired of this
mother-and-son foolishness, and wasn't going to leave any room for doubt
this time. Didn't propose to have people sizing his wife up for one of
his ancestors any more. So he married Lulu Littlebrown, who was just
turned eighteen. Chauncey was over fifty then, and wizened up like a
late pippin that has been out overnight in an early frost.

He took Lu to Chicago for the honeymoon, and Mose Greenebaum, who happened
to be going up to town for his fall goods, got into the parlor car with
them. By and by the porter came around and stopped beside Chauncey.

"Wouldn't your daughter like a pillow under her head?" says he.

Chauncey just groaned. Then--"Git; you Senegambian son of darkness!" And
the porter just naturally got.

Mose had been taking it all in, and now he went back to the smoking-room
and passed the word along to the drummers there. Every little while one
of them would lounge up the aisle to Chauncey and ask if he couldn't
lend his daughter a magazine, or give her an orange, or bring her a
drink. And the language that he gave back in return for these courtesies
wasn't at all fitting in a bridegroom. Then Mose had another happy
thought, and dropped off at a way station and wired the clerk at the
Palmer House.

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

I simply mention Chauncey in passing as an example of the foolishness of
thinking you can take any chances with a woman who has really decided
that she wants to marry, or that you can average up matrimonial
mistakes. And I want you to remember that marrying the wrong girl is
the one mistake that you've got to live with all your life. I think,
though, that if you tell Mabel what your assets are, she'll decide she
won't be your particular mistake.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

                  +----------------------------+
                  |           No. 10           |
                  +----------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, at the  |
                  |  Union Stock Yards in      |
                  |  Chicago, to his son,      |
                  |  Pierrepont, at the        |
                  |  Commercial House,         |
                  |  Jeffersonville, Indiana.  |
                  |  Mr. Pierrepont has been   |
                  |  promoted to the position  |
                  |  of traveling salesman     |
                  |  for the house, and has    |
                  |  started out on the road.  |
                  +----------------------------+

                              X

                                           CHICAGO, March 1, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ When I saw you start off yesterday I was just a
little uneasy; for you looked so blamed important and chesty that I am
inclined to think you will tell the first customer who says he doesn't
like our sausage that he knows what he can do about it. Repartee makes
reading lively, but business dull. And what the house needs is more
orders.

Sausage is the one subject of all others that a fellow in the packing
business ought to treat solemnly. Half the people in the world take a
joke seriously from the start, and the other half if you repeat it often
enough. Only last week the head of our sausage department started to put
out a tin-tag brand of frankfurts, but I made him take it off the market
quicker than lightning, because I knew that the first fool who saw the
tin-tag would ask if that was the license. And, though people would
grin a little at first, they'd begin to look serious after a while; and
whenever the butcher tried to sell them our brand they'd imagine they
heard the bark, and ask for "that real country sausage" at twice as much
a pound.

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

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

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

The fellow hawed and choked and wiped away a tear. Finally, he fetched
out that he loved the dog like a son, and that it broke his heart to
think of parting with him; that he wouldn't dare look Dandy in the face
after he had named the price he was asking for him, and that it was the
record-breaking, marked-down sacrifice sale of the year on dogs; that it
wasn't really money he was after, but a good home for the little chap.
Said that I had a rather pleasant face and he knew that he could trust
me to treat Dandy kindly; so--as a gift--he would let me have him for
five hundred.

"Cents?" says I.

"Dollars," says he, without blinking.

"It ought to be a mastiff at that price," says I.

"If you thought more of quality," says he, in a tone of sort of
dignified reproof, "and less of quantity, your brand would enjoy a
better reputation."

I was pretty hot, I can tell you, but I had laid myself open, so I just
said: "The sausage business is too poor to warrant our paying any such
price for light-weights. Bring around a bigger dog and then we'll talk;"
but the fellow only shook his head sadly, whistled to Dandy, and walked
off.

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

But all that aside, I want you to get it firmly fixed in your mind right
at the start that this trip is only an experiment, and that I am not at
all sure you were cut out by the Lord to be a drummer. But you can
figure on one thing--that you will never become the pride of the pond by
starting out to cut figure eights before you are firm on your skates.

A real salesman is one-part talk and nine-parts judgment; and he uses
the nine-parts of judgment to tell when to use the one-part of talk.
Goods ain't sold under Marquess of Queensberry rules any more, and
you'll find that knowing how many rounds the Old 'Un can last against
the Boiler-Maker won't really help you to load up the junior partner
with our Corn-fed brand hams.

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

Of course, you want to be nice and mellow with the trade, but always
remember that mellowness carried too far becomes rottenness. You can buy
some fellows with a cheap cigar and some with a cheap compliment, and
there's no objection to giving a man what he likes, though I never knew
smoking to do anything good except a ham, or flattery to help any one
except to make a fool of himself.

Real buyers ain't interested in much besides your goods and your prices.
Never run down your competitor's brand to them, and never let them run
down yours. Don't get on your knees for business, but don't hold your
nose so high in the air that an order can travel under it without your
seeing it. You'll meet a good many people on the road that you won't
like, but the house needs their business.

Some fellows will tell you that we play the hose on our dry salt meat
before we ship it, and that it shrinks in transit like a Baxter Street
Jew's all-wool suits in a rainstorm; that they wonder how we manage to
pack solid gristle in two-pound cans without leaving a little meat
hanging to it; and that the last car of lard was so strong that it came
back of its own accord from every retailer they shipped it to. The first
fellow will be lying, and the second will be exaggerating, and the third
may be telling the truth. With him you must settle on the spot; but
always remember that a man who's making a claim never underestimates his
case, and that you can generally compromise for something less than the
first figure. With the second you must sympathize, and say that the
matter will be reported to headquarters and the boss of the canning-room
called up on the carpet and made to promise that it will never happen
again. With the first you needn't bother. There's no use feeding expensive
"hen food" to an old Dominick that sucks eggs. The chances are that the
car weighed out more than it was billed, and that the fellow played the
hose on it himself and added a thousand pounds of cheap salt before he
jobbed it out to his trade.

Where you're going to slip up at first is in knowing which is which, but
if you don't learn pretty quick you'll not travel very far for the
house. For your own satisfaction I will say right here that you may know
you are in a fair way of becoming a good drummer by three things:

First--When you send us Orders.

Second--More Orders.

Third--Big Orders.

If you do this you won't have a great deal of time to write long
letters, and we won't have a great deal of time to read them, for we
will be very, very busy here making and shipping the goods. We aren't
specially interested in orders that the other fellow gets, or in knowing
how it happened after it has happened. If you like life on the road you
simply won't let it happen. So just send us your address every day and
your orders. They will tell us all that we want to know about "the
situation."

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

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

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

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

I wrote in to the house pretty often on that trip, explaining how it
was, going over the whole situation very carefully, and telling what our
competitors were doing, wherever I could find that they were doing
anything.

I gave old Hammer credit for more curiosity than he possessed, because
when I reached Cairo I found a telegram from him reading: "_Know what
our competitors are doing: they are getting all the trade. But what are
you doing?_" I saw then that the time for explaining was gone and that
the moment for resigning had arrived; so I just naturally sent in my
resignation. That is what we will expect from you--or orders.

                                     Your affectionate father,
                                                     JOHN GRAHAM.

                  +-----------------------------+
                  |           No. 11            |
                  +-----------------------------+
                  |  From John Graham, at the   |
                  |  Union Stock Yards in       |
                  |  Chicago, to his son,       |
                  |  Pierrepont, at The         |
                  |  Planters' Palace Hotel,    |
                  |  at Big Gap, Kentucky. Mr.  |
                  |  Pierrepont's orders are    |
                  |  small and his expenses     |
                  |  are large, so his father   |
                  |  feels pessimistic over     |
                  |  his prospects.             |
                  +-----------------------------+

                              XI

                                          CHICAGO, April 10, 189-

_Dear Pierrepont:_ You ought to be feeling mighty thankful to-day to the
fellow who invented fractions, because while your selling cost for last
month was within the limit, it took a good deal of help from the decimal
system to get it there. You are in the position of the boy who was
chased by the bull--open to congratulations because he reached the tree
first, and to condolence because a fellow up a tree, in the middle of a
forty-acre lot, with a disappointed bull for company, is in a mighty bad
fix.

I don't want to bear down hard on you right at the beginning of your