Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son. George Horace Lorimer

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.

      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.