lasses of about twenty each and
dismissed them, asking the first class to come at three the next
afternoon. The young men and young women went thoughtfully away; they
were revolving their initial lesson in the cardinal principle of
success--enthusiasm. When the two friends were alone Pierson said:
"Do you know, I'm beginning to get a glimpse of you. And I see there
isn't anything beyond your reach. You'll get whatever you want."

Scarborough's reply was a sudden look of dejection, an impatient shrug.
Then he straightened himself, lifted his head with a lion-like toss
that shook back the obstinate lock of hair from his forehead. He laid
his hand on his friend's shoulder. "Yes," he said, "because I'm
determined to want whatever I get. Good fortune and bad--everything
shall be grist for THIS mill."

Pierson attended next day's class and afterward went to Olivia with an
account of it.

"You ought to have seen him put those fellows through, one at a time.
I tell you, he'll teach them more in the next three months than they'll
learn of the whole faculty. And this summer he'll get every man and
woman of them enough to pay their way through college next year."

"What did he do to-day?" asked Olivia. Of the many qualities she loved
in Pierson, the one she loved most was his unbounded, unselfish
admiration for his friend.

"He took each man separately, the others watching and listening. First
he'd play the part of book agent with his pupil as a reluctant
customer. Then he'd reverse, and the pupil as agent would try to sell
him the book, he pretending to be an ignorant, obstinate, ill-natured,
close-fisted farmer or farmer's wife. It was a liberal education in
the art of persuasion. If his pupils had his brains and his
personality, Peaks of Progress would be on the center-table in half the
farm parlors of Wisconsin and Minnesota by September."

"IF they had his personality, and IF they had his brains," said Olivia.

"Well, as it is, he'll make the dumbest ass in the lot bray to some
purpose."

In September, when Scarborough closed his headquarters at Milwaukee and
set out for Indianapolis, he found that the average earnings of his
agents were two hundred and seventy-five dollars, and that he himself
had made forty-three hundred. Mills came and offered him a place in
the publishing house at ten thousand a year and a commission. He
instantly rejected it. He had already arranged to spend a year with
one of the