Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son | Page 7

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