I started in to curl up that young fellow to a crisp.“I started in to curl up that young fellow to a crisp.”
Bill fetched a groan. “Zeke,” says he, “you cornered me there, and I ’spose I might as well walk up to the Captain’s office and settle. I hadn’t bought or sold a bushel on my own account in a year till last week, when I got your letter saying that you were coming. Then I saw what looked like asafe chance to scalp the market for a couple of cents a bushel, and I bought 10,000 September, intending to turn over the profits to you as a little present, so that you could see the town and have a good time without it’s costing you anything.”
The Deacon judged from Bill’s expression that he had got nipped and was going to try to unload the loss on him, so he changed his face to the one which he used when attending the funeral of any one who hadn’t been a professor, and came back quick and hard:
“I’m surprised, William, that you should think I would accept money made in gambling. Let this be a lesson to you. How much did you lose?”
“That’s the worst of it—I didn’t lose; I made two hundred dollars,” and Bill hove another sigh.
“Made two hundred dollars!” echoed the Deacon, and he changed his face again for the one which he used when he found a leadquarter in his till and couldn’t remember who had passed it on him.
“Yes,” Bill went on, “and I’m ashamed of it, for you’ve made me see things in a new light. Of course, after what you’ve said, I know it would be an insult to offer you the money. And I feel now that it wouldn’t be right to keep it myself. I must sleep on it and try to find the straight thing to do.”
I guess it really didn’t interfere with Bill’s sleep, but the Deacon sat up with the corpse of that two hundred dollars, you bet. In the morning at breakfast he asked Brother Bill to explain all about this speculating business, what made the market go up and down, and whether real corn or wheat or pork figured in any stage of a deal. Bill looked sort of sad and dreamy-eyed, as if his conscience hadn’t digested that two hundred yet, but he was mighty obliging about explaining everything to Zeke. Hehad changed his face for the one which he wore when he sold an easy customer ground peas and chicory for O. G. Java, and every now and then he gulped as if he was going to start a hymn. When Bill told him how good and bad weather sent the market up and down, he nodded and said that that part of it was all right, because the weather was of the Lord.
“Not on the Board of Trade it isn’t,” Bill answered back; “at least, not to any marked extent; it’s from the weather man or some liar in the corn belt, and, as the weather man usually guesses wrong, I reckon there isn’t any special inspiration about it. The game is to guess what’s going to happen, not what has happened, and by the time the real weather comes along everybody has guessed wrong and knocked the market off a cent or two.”
That made the Deacon’s chin whiskers droop a little, but he began to ask questionsagain, and by and by he discovered that away behind—about a hundred miles behind, but that was close enough for the Deacon—a deal in futures there were real wheat and pork. Said then that he’d been misinformed and misled; that speculation was a legitimate business, involving skill and sagacity; that his last scruple was removed, and that he would accept the two hundred.
Bill brightened right up at that and thanked him for putting it so clear and removing the doubts that had been worrying him. Said that he could speculate with a clear conscience after listening to the Deacon’s able exposition of the subject. Was only sorry he hadn’t seen him to talk it over before breakfast, as the two hundred had been lying so heavy on his mind all night that he’d got up early and mailed a check for it to the Deacon’s pastor and told him to spend it on his poor.
Zeke took the evening train home in order to pry that check out of the elder, but old Doc. Hoover was a pretty quick stepper himself and he’d blown the whole two hundred as soon as he got it, buying winter coal for poor people.
I simply mention the Deacon in passing as an example of the fact that it’s easy for a man who thinks he’s all right to go all wrong when he sees a couple of hundred dollars lying around loose a little to one side of the straight and narrow path; and that when he reaches down to pick up the money there’s usually a string tied to it and a small boy in the bushes to give it a yank. Easy-come money never draws interest; easy-borrowed dollars pay usury.
Of course, the Board of Trade and every other commercial exchange have their legitimate uses, but all you need to know just now is that speculation by a fellow who never owns more pork at a time than he seeson his breakfast plate isn’t one of them. When you become a packer you may go on ’Change as a trader; until then you can go there only as a sucker.
Your affectionate father,John Graham.
No. 15FROM 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.
No. 15
FROM John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at The Scrub Oaks, Spring Lake, Michigan. Mr. Pierrepont has been promoted again, and the old man sends him a little advice with his appointment.
Chicago, September 1, 189—
Dear Pierrepont:I judge from yours of the twenty-ninth that you must have the black bass in those parts pretty well terrorized. I never could quite figure it out, but there seems to be something about a fish that makes even a cold-water deacon see double. I reckon it must be that while Eve was learning the first principles of dressmaking from the snake, Adam was off bass fishing and keeping his end up by learning how to lie.
Don’t overstock yourself with those four-pound fish yarns, though, because the boys have been bringing them back from their vacations till we’ve got enough to last us for a year of Fridays. And if you’re sending them to keep in practice, you might as well quit, because we’ve decided to take you off the road when you come back, and make you assistant manager of the lard department.The salary will be fifty dollars a week, and the duties of the position to do your work so well that the manager can’t run the department without you, and that you can run the department without the manager.
To do this you will have to know lard; to know yourself; and to know those under you. To some fellows lard is just hog fat, and not always that, if they would rather make a dollar to-day than five to-morrow. But it was a good deal more to Jack Summers, who held your new job until we had to promote him to canned goods.
Jack knew lard from the hog to the frying pan; was up on lard in history and religion; originated what he called the “Ham and” theory, proving that Moses’ injunction against pork must have been dissolved by the Circuit Court, because Noah included a couple of shoats in his cargo, and called one of his sons Ham, out of gratitude, probably, after tasting a slice broiled for the firsttime; argued that all the great nations lived on fried food, and that America was the greatest of them all, owing to the energy-producing qualities of pie, liberally shortened with lard.
It almost broke Jack’s heart when we decided to manufacture our new cottonseed oil product, Seedoiline. But on reflection he saw that it just gave him an extra hold on the heathen that he couldn’t convert to lard, and he started right out for the Hebrew and vegetarian vote. Jack had enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is the best shortening for any job; it makes heavy work light.
A good many young fellows envy their boss because they think he makes the rules and can do as he pleases. As a matter of fact, he’s the only man in the shop who can’t. He’s like the fellow on the tight-rope—there’s plenty of scenery under him and lots of room around him, but he’s got to keep his feet on the wire all the time and travel straight ahead.
A clerk has just one boss to answer to—the manager. But the manager has just as many bosses as he has clerks under him. He can make rules, but he’s the only man who can’t afford to break them now and then. A fellow is a boss simply because he’s a better man than those under him, and there’s a heap of responsibility in being better than the next fellow.
No man can ask more than he gives. A fellow who can’t take orders can’t give them. If his rules are too hard for him to mind, you can bet they are too hard for the clerks who don’t get half so much for minding them as he does. There’s no alarm clock for the sleepy man like an early rising manager; and there’s nothing breeds work in an office like a busy boss.
Of course, setting a good example is just a small part of a manager’s duties. It’s not enough to settle yourself firm on the box seat—you must have every man under you hitched up right and well in hand. Youcan’t work individuals by general rules. Every man is a special case and needs a special pill.
When you fix up a snug little nest for a Plymouth Rock hen and encourage her with a nice porcelain egg, it doesn’t always follow that she has reached the fricassee age because she doesn’t lay right off. Sometimes she will respond to a little red pepper in her food.
I don’t mean by this that you ever want to drive your men, because the lash always leaves its worst soreness under the skin. A hundred men will forgive a blow in the face where one will a blow to his self-esteem. Tell a man the truth about himself and shame the devil if you want to, but you won’t shame the man you’re trying to reach, because he won’t believe you. But if you can start him on the road that will lead him to the truth he’s mighty apt to try to reform himself before any one else finds him out.
Consider carefully before you say a hardword to a man, but never let a chance to say a good one go by. Praise judiciously bestowed is money invested.
Never learn anything about your men except from themselves. A good manager needs no detectives, and the fellow who can’t read human nature can’t manage it. The phonograph records of a fellow’s character are lined in his face, and a man’s days tell the secrets of his nights.
Be slow to hire and quick to fire. The time to discover incompatibility of temper and curl-papers is before the marriage ceremony. But when you find that you’ve hired the wrong man, you can’t get rid of him too quick. Pay him an extra month, but don’t let him stay another day. A discharged clerk in the office is like a splinter in the thumb—a centre of soreness. There are no exceptions to this rule, because there are no exceptions to human nature.
Never threaten, because a threat is a promise to pay that it isn’t alwaysconvenient to meet, but if you don’t make it good it hurts your credit. Save a threat till you’re ready to act, and then you won’t need it. In all your dealings, remember that to-day is your opportunity; to-morrow some other fellow’s.
Keep close to your men. When a fellow’s sitting on top of a mountain he’s in a mighty dignified and exalted position, but if he’s gazing at the clouds, he’s missing a heap of interesting and important doings down in the valley. Never lose your dignity, of course, but tie it up in all the red tape you can find around the office, and tuck it away in the safe. It’s easy for a boss to awe his clerks, but a man who is feared to his face is hated behind his back. A competent boss can move among his men without having to draw an imaginary line between them, because they will see the real one if it exists.
Besides keeping in touch with your office men, you want to feel your salesmen all thetime. Send each of them a letter every day so that they won’t forget that we are making goods for which we need orders; and insist on their sending you a line every day, whether they have anything to say or not. When a fellow has to write in six times a week to the house, he uses up his explanations mighty fast, and he’s pretty apt to hustle for business to make his seventh letter interesting.
Right here I want to repeat that in keeping track of others and their faults it’s very, very important that you shouldn’t lose sight of your own. Authority swells up some fellows so that they can’t see their corns; but a wise man tries to cure his own while remembering not to tread on his neighbors’.
A good many salesmen have an idea that buyers are only interested in funny stories.“A good many salesmen have an idea that buyersare only interested in funny stories.”
In this connection, the story of Lemuel Hostitter, who kept the corner grocery in my old town, naturally comes to mind. Lem was probably the meanest white man in the State of Missouri, and it wasn’t any walk-over to hold the belt in those days.Most grocers were satisfied to adulterate their coffee with ground peas, but Lem was so blamed mean that he adulterated the peas first. Bought skin-bruised hams and claimed that the bruise was his private and particular brand, stamped in the skin, showing that they were a fancy article, packed expressly for his fancy family trade. Ran a soda-water fountain in the front of his store with home-made syrups that ate the lining out of the children’s stomachs, and a blind tiger in the back room with moonshine whiskey that pickled their daddies’ insides. Take it by and large, Lem’s character smelled about as various as his store, and that wasn’t perfumed with lily-of-the-valley, you bet.
One time and another most men dropped into Lem’s store of an evening, because there wasn’t any other place to go and swap lies about the crops and any of the neighbors who didn’t happen to be there. As Lem was always around, in the end he was the onlyman in town whose meanness hadn’t been talked over in that grocery. Naturally, he began to think that he was the only decent white man in the county. Got to shaking his head and reckoning that the town was plum rotten. Said that such goings on would make a pessimist of a goat. Wanted to know if public opinion couldn’t be aroused so that decency would have a show in the village.
Most men get information when they ask for it, and in the end Lem fetched public opinion all right. One night the local chapter of the W.C.T.U. borrowed all the loose hatchets in town and made a good, clean, workmanlike job of the back part of his store, though his whiskey was so mean that even the ground couldn’t soak it up. The noise brought out the men, and they sort of caught the spirit of the happy occasion. When they were through, Lem’s stock and fixtures looked mighty sick, and they had Lem on a rail headed for the county line.
I don’t know when I’ve seen a more surprised man than Lem. He couldn’t cuss even. But as he never came back, to ask for any explanation, I reckon he figured it out that they wanted to get rid of him because he was too good for the town.
I simply mention Lem in passing as an example of the fact that when you’re through sizing up the other fellow, it’s a good thing to step back from yourself and see how you look. Then add fifty per cent. to your estimate of your neighbor for virtues that you can’t see, and deduct fifty per cent. from yourself for faults that you’ve missed in your inventory, and you’ll have a pretty accurate result.
Your affectionate father,John Graham.
No. 16FROM 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.
No. 16
FROM John Graham, at the Schweitzerkasenhof, Karlsbad, Austria, to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont has shown mild symptoms of an attack of society fever, and his father is administering some simple remedies.
Karlsbad, October 6, 189—
Dear Pierrepont:If you happen to run across Doc Titherington you’d better tell him to go into training, because I expect to be strong enough to lick him by the time I get back. Between that ten-day boat which he recommended and these Dutch doctors, I’m almost well and about broke. You don’t really have to take the baths here to get rid of your rheumatism—their bills scare it out of a fellow.
They tell me we had a pretty quiet trip across, and I’m not saying that we didn’t, because for the first three days I was so busy holding myself in my berth that I couldn’t get a chance to look out the porthole to see for myself. I reckon there isn’t anything alive that can beat me at being seasick, unless it’s a camel, and he’s got three stomachs.
When I did get around I was a good dealof a maverick—for all the old fellows were playing poker in the smoking-room and all the young ones were lallygagging under the boats—until I found that we were carrying a couple of hundred steers between decks. They looked mighty homesick, you bet, and I reckon they sort of sized me up as being a long ways from Chicago, for we cottoned to each other right from the start. Take ’em as they ran, they were a mighty likely bunch of steers, and I got a heap of solid comfort out of them. There must have been good money in them, too, for they reached England in prime condition.
I wish you would tell our people at the Beef House to look into this export cattle business, and have all the facts and figures ready for me when I get back. There seems to be a good margin in it, and with our English house we are fixed up to handle it all right at this end. It makes me mighty sick to think that we’ve been sitting back on our hindlegs and letting the other fellow runaway with this trade. We are packers, I know, but that’s no reason why we can’t be shippers, too. I want to milk the critter coming and going, twice a day, and milk her dry. Unless you do the whole thing you can’t do anything in business as it runs to-day. There’s still plenty of room at the top, but there isn’t much anywheres else.
There may be reasons why we haven’t been able to tackle this exporting of live cattle, but you can tell our people there that they have got to be mighty good reasons to wipe out the profit I see in it. Of course, I may have missed them, for I’ve only looked into the business a little by way of recreation, but it won’t do to say that it’s not in our line, because anything which carries a profit on four legs is in our line.
I dwell a little on the matter because, while this special case is out of your department, the general principle is in it. The way to think of a thing in business is to think of it first, and the way to get ashare of the trade is to go for all of it. Half the battle’s in being on the hilltop first; and the other half’s in staying there. In speaking of these matters, and in writing you about your new job, I’ve run a little ahead of your present position, because I’m counting on you to catch up with me. But you want to get it clearly in mind that I’m writing to you not as the head of the house, but as the head of the family, and that I don’t propose to mix the two things.
Even as assistant manager of the lard department, you don’t occupy a very important position with us yet. But the great trouble with some fellows is that a little success goes to their heads. Instead of hiding their authority behind their backs and trying to get close to their men, they use it as a club to keep them off. And a boss with a case of big-head will fill an office full of sore heads.
I don’t know any one who has better opportunities for making himself unpopularthan an assistant, for the clerks are apt to cuss him for all the manager’s meanness, and the manager is likely to find fault with him for all the clerks’ cussedness. But if he explains his orders to the clerks he loses his authority, and if he excuses himself to the manager he loses his usefulness. A manager needs an assistant to take trouble from him, not to bring it to him.
The one important thing for you to remember all the time is not to forget. It’s easier for a boss to do a thing himself than to tell some one twice to do it. Petty details take up just as much room in a manager’s head as big ideas; and the more of the first you store for him, the more warehouse room you leave him for the second. When a boss has to spend his days swearing at his assistant and the clerks have to sit up nights hating him, they haven’t much time left to swear by the house. Satisfaction is the oil of the business machine.
Some fellows can only see those abovethem, and others can only see those under them, but a good man is cross-eyed and can see both ends at once. An assistant who becomes his manager’s right hand is going to find the left hand helping him; and it’s not hard for a clerk to find good points in a boss who finds good ones in him. Pulling from above and boosting from below make climbing easy.
In handling men, your own feelings are the only ones that are of no importance. I don’t mean by this that you want to sacrifice your self-respect, but you must keep in mind that the bigger the position the broader the man must be to fill it. And a diet of courtesy and consideration gives girth to a boss.
Of course, all this is going to take so much time and thought that you won’t have a very wide margin left for golf—especially in the afternoons. I simply mention this in passing, because I see in the Chicago papers which have been sent me that youwere among the players on the links one afternoon a fortnight ago. Golf’s a nice, foolish game, and there ain’t any harm in it so far as I know except for the balls—the stiff balls at the beginning, the lost balls in the middle, and the highballs at the end of the game. But a young fellow who wants to be a boss butcher hasn’t much daylight to waste on any kind of links except sausage links.
Of course, a man should have a certain amount of play, just as a boy is entitled to a piece of pie at the end of his dinner, but he don’t want to make a meal of it. Any one who lets sinkers take the place of bread and meat gets bilious pretty young; and these fellows who haven’t any job, except to blow the old man’s dollars, are a good deal like the little niggers in the pie-eating contest at the County Fair—they’ve a-plenty of pastry and they’re attracting a heap of attention, but they’ve got a stomach-ache coming to them by and by.
I want to caution you right here against getting the society bug in your head. I’d sooner you’d smoke these Turkish cigarettes which smell like a fire in the fertilizer factory. You’re going to meet a good many stray fools in the course of business every day without going out to hunt up the main herd after dark.
Everybody over here in Europe thinks that we haven’t any society in America, and a power of people in New York think that we haven’t any society in Chicago. But so far as I can see there are just as many ninety-nine-cent men spending million-dollar incomes in one place as another; and the rules that govern the game seem to be the same in all three places—you’ve got to be a descendant to belong, and the farther you descend the harder you belong. The only difference is that, in Europe, the ancestor who made money enough so that his family could descend, has been dead so long that they have forgotten his shop; in New Yorkhe’s so recent that they can only pretend to have forgotten it; but in Chicago they can’t lose it because the ancestor is hustling on the Board of Trade or out at the Stock Yards. I want to say right here that I don’t propose to be an ancestor until after I’m dead. Then, if you want to have some fellow whose grandfather sold bad whiskey to the Indians sniff and smell pork when you come into the room, you can suit yourself.
Of course, I may be off in sizing this thing up, because it’s a little out of my line. But it’s been my experience that these people who think that they are all the choice cuts off the critter, and that the rest of us are only fit for sausage, are usually chuck steak when you get them under the knife. I’ve tried two or three of them, who had gone broke, in the office, but when you separate them from their money there’s nothing left, not even their friends.
I never see a fellow trying to crawl or to buy his way into society that I don’t thinkof my old friend Hank Smith and his wife Kate—Kate Botts she was before he married her—and how they tried to butt their way through the upper crust.
Hank and I were boys together in Missouri, and he stayed along in the old town after I left. I heard of him on and off as tending store a little, and farming a little, and loafing a good deal. Then I forgot all about him, until one day a few years ago when he turned up in the papers as Captain Henry Smith, the Klondike Gold King, just back from Circle City, with a million in dust and anything you please in claims. There’s never any limit to what a miner may be worth in those, except his imagination.
I was a little puzzled when, a week later, my office boy brought me a card reading Colonel Henry Augustus Bottes-Smythe, but I supposed it was some distinguished foreigner who had come to size me up so that he could round out his roast onChicago in his new book, and I told the boy to show the General in.
I’ve got a pretty good memory for faces, and I’d bought too much store plug of Hank in my time not to know him, even with a clean shave and a plug hat. Some men dry up with success, but it was just spouting out of Hank. Told me he’d made his pile and that he was tired of living on the slag heap; that he’d spent his whole life where money hardly whispered, let alone talked, and he was going now where it would shout. Wanted to know what was the use of being a nob if a fellow wasn’t the nobbiest sort of a nob. Said he’d bought a house on Beacon Hill, in Boston, and that if I’d prick up my ears occasionally I’d hear something drop into the Back Bay. Handed me his new card four times and explained that it was the rawest sort of dog to carry a brace of names in your card holster; that it gave you the drop on the swells every time, and thatthey just had to throw up both hands and pass you the pot when you showed down. Said that Bottes was old English for Botts, and that Smythe was new American for Smith; the Augustus was just a fancy touch, a sort of high-card kicker.
I didn’t explain to Hank, because it was congratulations and not explanations that he wanted, and I make it a point to show a customer the line of goods that he’s looking for. And I never heard the full particulars of his experiences in the East, though, from what I learned afterward, Hank struck Boston with a bang, all right.
He located his claim on Beacon Hill, between a Mayflower descendant and a Declaration Signer’s great-grandson, breeds which believe that when the Lord made them He was through, and that the rest of us just happened. And he hadn’t been in town two hours before he started in to make improvements. There was a high wrought-iron railing in front of his house, and he had thatgilded first thing, because, as he said, he wasn’t running a receiving vault and he didn’t want any mistakes. Then he bought a nice, open barouche, had the wheels painted red, hired a nigger coachman and started out in style to be sociable and get acquainted. Left his card all the way down one side of Beacon Street, and then drove back leaving it on the other. Everywhere he stopped he found that the whole family was out. Kept it up a week, on and off, but didn’t seem to have any luck. Thought that the men must be hot sports and the women great gadders to keep on the jump so much. Allowed that they were the liveliest little lot of fleas that he had ever chased. Decided to quit trying to nail ’em one at a time, and planned out something that he reckoned would round up the whole bunch.
Hank sent out a thousand invitations to his grand opening, as he called it; left one at every house within a mile. Had a brass band on the front steps and fireworks on theroof. Ordered forty kegs from the brewery and hired a fancy mixer to sling together mild snorts, as he called them, for the ladies. They tell me that, when the band got to going good on the steps and the fireworks on the roof, even Beacon Street looked out the windows to see what was doing. There must have been ten thousand people in the street and not a soul but Hank and his wife and the mixer in the house. Some one yelled speech, and then the whole crowd took it up, till Hank came out on the steps. He shut off the band with one hand and stopped the fireworks with the other. Said that speechmaking wasn’t his strangle-hold; that he’d been living on snowballs in the Klondike for so long that his gas-pipe was frozen; but that this welcome started the ice and he thought about three fingers of the plumber’s favorite prescription would cut out the frost. Would the crowd join him? He had invited a few friends in forthe evening, but there seemed to be some misunderstanding about the date, and he hated to have good stuff curdle on his hands.
While this was going on, the Mayflower descendant was telephoning for the police from one side and the Signer’s great-grandson from the other, and just as the crowd yelled and broke for the house two patrol wagons full of policemen got there. But they had to turn in a riot call and bring out the reserves before they could break up Hank’s little Boston tea-party.
After all, Hank did what he started out to do with his party—rounded up all his neighbors in a bunch, though not exactly according to schedule. For next morning there were so many descendants and great-grandsons in the police court to prefer charges that it looked like a reunion of the Pilgrim Fathers. The Judge fined Hank on sixteen counts and bound him over to keep the peace for a hundred years. Thatafternoon he left for the West on a special, because the Limited didn’t get there quick enough. But before going he tacked on the front door of his house a sign which read:
“Neighbors paying their party calls will please not heave rocks through windows to attract attention. Not in and not going to be. Gone back to Circle City for a little quiet.“Yours truly,“Hank Smith.“N.B.—Too swift for your uncle.”
“Neighbors paying their party calls will please not heave rocks through windows to attract attention. Not in and not going to be. Gone back to Circle City for a little quiet.
“Yours truly,“Hank Smith.
“N.B.—Too swift for your uncle.”
Hank dropped by my office for a minute on his way to ’Frisco. Said he liked things lively, but there was altogether too much rough-house on Beacon Hill for him. Judged that as the crowd which wasn’t invited was so blamed sociable, the one which was invited would have stayed a week if it hadn’t slipped up on the date. That mightbe the Boston idea, but he wanted a little more refinement in his. Said he was a pretty free spender, and would hold his end up, but he hated a hog. Of course I told Hank that Boston wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be in the school histories, and that Circle City wasn’t so tough as it read in the newspapers, for there was no way of making him understand that he might have lived in Boston for a hundred years without being invited to a strawberry sociable. Because a fellow cuts ice on the Arctic Circle, it doesn’t follow that he’s going to be worth beans on the Back Bay.
I simply mention Hank in a general way. His case may be a little different, but it isn’t any more extreme than lots of others all around you over there and me over here. Of course, I want you to enjoy good society, but any society is good society where congenial men and women meet together for wholesome amusement. But I want you tokeep away from people who choose play for a profession. A man’s as good as he makes himself, but no man’s any good because his grandfather was.
Your affectionate father,John Graham.
No. 17FROM 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.
No. 17
FROM John Graham, at the London House of Graham & Co., to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont has written his father that he is getting along famously in his new place.
London, October 24, 189—
Dear Pierrepont:Well, I’m headed for home at last, checked high and as full of prance as a spotted circus horse. Those Dutchmen ain’t so bad as their language, after all, for they’ve fixed up my rheumatism so that I can bear down on my right leg without thinking that it’s going to break off.
I’m glad to learn from your letter that you’re getting along so well in your new place, and I hope that when I get home your boss will back up all the good things which you say about yourself. For the future, however, you needn’t bother to keep me posted along this line. It’s the one subject on which most men are perfectly frank, and it’s about the only one on which it isn’t necessary to be. There’s never any use trying to hide the fact that you’re a jim-dandy—you’re bound to be found out. Of course, you want to have your eyes open all thetime for a good man, but follow the old maid’s example—look under the bed and in the closet, not in the mirror, for him. A man who does big things is too busy to talk about them. When the jaws really need exercise, chew gum.
Some men go through life on the Sarsaparilla Theory—that they’ve got to give a hundred doses of talk about themselves for every dollar which they take in; and that’s a pretty good theory when you’re getting a dollar for ten cents’ worth of ingredients. But a man who’s giving a dollar’s worth of himself for ninety-nine cents doesn’t need to throw in any explanations.
Of course, you’re going to meet fellows right along who pass as good men for a while, because they say they’re good men; just as a lot of fives are in circulation which are accepted at their face value until they work up to the receiving teller. And you’re going to see these men taking buzzards and coining eagles from them that will foolpeople so long as they can keep them in the air; but sooner or later they’re bound to swoop back to their dead horse, and you’ll get the buzzard smell.
Hot air can take up a balloon a long ways, but it can’t keep it there. And when a fellow’s turning flip-flops up among the clouds, he’s naturally going to have the farmers gaping at him. But in the end there always comes a time when the parachute fails to work. I don’t know anything that’s quite so dead as a man who’s fallen three or four thousand feet off the edge of a cloud.
The only way to gratify a taste for scenery is to climb a mountain. You don’t get up so quick, but you don’t come down so sudden. Even then, there’s a chance that a fellow may slip and fall over a precipice, but not unless he’s foolish enough to try short-cuts over slippery places; though some men can manage to fall down the hall stairs and break their necks. The path isn’tthe shortest way to the top, but it’s usually the safest way.
Life isn’t a spurt, but a long, steady climb. You can’t run far up-hill without stopping to sit down. Some men do a day’s work and then spend six lolling around admiring it. They rush at a thing with a whoop and use up all their wind in that. And when they’re rested and have got it back, they whoop again and start off in a new direction. They mistake intention for determination, and after they have told you what they propose to do and get right up to doing it, they simply peter out.
I’ve heard a good deal in my time about the foolishness of hens, but when it comes to right-down, plum foolishness, give me a rooster, every time. He’s always strutting and stretching and crowing and bragging about things with which he had nothing to do. When the sun rises, you’d think that he was making all the light, instead of all the noise; when the farmer’s wife throws thescraps in the henyard, he crows as if he was the provider for the whole farmyard and was asking a blessing on the food; when he meets another rooster, he crows; and when the other rooster licks him, he crows; and so he keeps it up straight through the day. He even wakes up during the night and crows a little on general principles. But when you hear from a hen, she’s laid an egg, and she don’t make a great deal of noise about it, either.
I speak of these things in a general way, because I want you to keep in mind all the time that steady, quiet, persistent, plain work can’t be imitated or replaced by anything just as good, and because your request for a job for Courtland Warrington naturally brings them up. You write that Court says that a man who has occupied his position in the world naturally can’t cheapen himself by stepping down into any little piddling job where he’d have to do undignified things.
I want to start right out by saying that I know Court and his whole breed like a glue factory, and that we can’t use him in our business. He’s one of those fellows who start in at the top and naturally work down to the bottom, because that is where they belong. His father gave him an interest in the concern when he left college, and since the old man failed three years ago and took a salary himself, Court’s been sponging on him and waiting for a nice, dignified job to come along and steal him. But we are not in the kidnapping business.
The only undignified job I know of is loafing, and nothing can cheapen a man who sponges instead of hunting any sort of work, because he’s as cheap already as they can be made. I never could quite understand these fellows who keep down every decent instinct in order to keep up appearance, and who will stoop to any sort of real meanness to boost up their false pride.
Jim Hicks dared Fatty Wilkins to eat a piece of dirt.“Jim Hicks dared Fatty Wilkins to eat a piece of dirt.”
They always remind me of little FattyWilkins, who came to live in our town back in Missouri when I was a boy. His mother thought a heap of Fatty, and Fatty thought a heap of himself, or his stomach, which was the same thing. Looked like he’d been taken from a joke book. Used to be a great eater. Stuffed himself till his hide was stretched as tight as a sausage skin, and then howled for painkiller. Spent all his pennies for cakes, because candy wasn’t filling enough. Hogged ’em in the shop, for fear he would have to give some one a bite if he ate them on the street.
The other boys didn’t take to Fatty, and they didn’t make any special secret of it when he was around. He was a mighty brave boy and a mighty strong boy and a mighty proud boy—with his mouth; but he always managed to slip out of anything that looked like a fight by having a sore hand or a case of the mumps. The truth of the matter was that he was afraid of everything except food, and that was the thingwhich was hurting him most. It’s mighty seldom that a fellow’s afraid of what he ought to be afraid of in this world.
Of course, like most cowards, while Fatty always had an excuse for not doing something that might hurt his skin, he would take a dare to do anything that would hurt his self-respect, for fear the boys would laugh at him, or say that he was afraid, if he refused. So one day during recess Jim Hicks dared him to eat a piece of dirt. Fatty hesitated a little, because, while he was pretty promiscuous about what he put into his stomach, he had never included dirt in his bill-of-fare. But when the boys began to say that he was afraid, Fatty up and swallowed it.
And when he dared the other boys to do the same thing and none of them would take the dare, it made him mighty proud and puffed up. Got to charging the bigger boys and the lounger around the post-office a cent to see him eat a piece of dirt the size ofa hickory-nut. Found there was good money in that, and added grasshoppers, at two cents apiece, as a side line. Found them so popular that he took on chinch bugs at a nickel, and fairly coined money. The last I heard of Fatty he was in a Dime Museum, drawing two salaries—one as “The Fat Man,” and the other as “Launcelot, The Locust Eater, the Only Man Alive with a Gizzard.”
You are going to meet a heap of Fatties, first and last, fellows who’ll eat a little dirt “for fun” or to show off, and who’ll eat a little more because they find that there’s some easy money or times in it. It’s hard to get at these men, because when they’ve lost everything they had to be proud of, they still keep their pride. You can always bet that when a fellow’s pride makes him touchy, it’s because there are some mighty raw spots on it.
It’s been my experience that pride is usually a spur to the strong and a drag on theweak. It drives the strong man along and holds the weak one back. It makes the fellow with the stiff upper lip and the square jaw smile at a laugh and laugh at a sneer; it keeps his conscience straight and his back humped over his work; it makes him appreciate the little things and fight for the big ones. But it makes the fellow with the retreating forehead do the thing that looks right, instead of the thing that is right; it makes him fear a laugh and shrivel up at a sneer; it makes him live to-day on to-morrow’s salary; it makes him a cheap imitation of some Willie who has a little more money than he has, without giving him zip enough to go out and force luck for himself.
I never see one of these fellows swelling around with their petty larceny pride that I don’t think of a little experience of mine when I was a boy. An old fellow caught me lifting a watermelon in his patch, one afternoon, and instead of cuffing me and lettingme go, as I had expected if I got caught, he led me home by the ear to my ma, and told her what I had been up to.
Your grandma had been raised on the old-fashioned plan, and she had never heard of these new-fangled theories of reasoning gently with a child till its under lip begins to stick out and its eyes to fill with tears as it sees the error of its ways. She fetched the tears all right, but she did it with a trunk strap or a slipper. And your grandma was a pretty substantial woman. Nothing of the tootsey-wootsey about her foot, and nothing of the airy-fairy trifle about her slipper. When she was through I knew that I’d been licked—polished right off to a point—and then she sent me to my room and told me not to poke my nose out of it till I could recite the Ten Commandments and the Sunday-school lesson by heart.
There was a whole chapter of it, and an Old Testament chapter at that, but I laid right into it because I knew ma, and supperwas only two hours off. I can repeat that chapter still, forward and backward, without missing a word or stopping to catch my breath.
Every now and then old Doc Hoover used to come into the Sunday-school room and scare the scholars into fits by going around from class to class and asking questions. That next Sunday, for the first time, I was glad to see him happen in, and I didn’t try to escape attention when he worked around to our class. For ten minutes I’d been busting for him to ask me to recite a verse of the lesson, and, when he did, I simply cut loose and recited the whole chapter and threw in the Ten Commandments for good measure. It sort of dazed the Doc, because he had come to me for information about the Old Testament before, and we’d never got much beyond, And Ahab begat Jahab, or words to that effect. But when he got over the shock he made me stand right up before the wholeschool and do it again. Patted me on the head and said I was “an honor to my parents and an example to my playmates.”
I had been looking down all the time, feeling mighty proud and scared, but at that I couldn’t help glancing up to see the other boys admire me. But the first person my eye lit on was your grandma, standing in the back of the room, where she had stopped for a moment on her way up to church, and glaring at me in a mighty unpleasant way.
“Tell ’em, John,” she said right out loud, before everybody.
There was no way to run, for the Elder had hold of my hand, and there was no place to hide, though I reckon I could have crawled into a rat hole. So, to gain time, I blurted out:
“Tell ’em what, mam?”
“Tell ’em how you come to have your lesson so nice.”
I learned to hate notoriety right then and there, but I knew there was no switchingher off on to the weather when she wanted to talk religion. So I shut my eyes and let it come, though it caught on my palate once or twice on the way out.
“Hooked a watermelon, mam.”
There wasn’t any need for further particulars with that crowd, and they simply howled. Ma led me up to our pew, allowing that she’d tend to me Monday for disgracing her in public that way—and she did.
That was a twelve-grain dose, without any sugar coat, but it sweat more cant and false pride out of my system than I could get back into it for the next twenty years. I learned right there how to be humble, which is a heap more important than knowing how to be proud. There are mighty few men that need any lessons in that.
Your affectionate father,John Graham.