in business or railway management.
One must begin at the bottom. One must mount the ladder from the lowest
rung. But this lowest rung is everything. Any man who can stand upon it
with his foot well poised, his head erect, his arms braced and his eye
directed upward, will inevitably mount to the top.

But after all--I say this as a kind of afterthought in conclusion--why
bother with success at all? I have observed that the successful people
get very little real enjoyment out of life. In fact the contrary is
true. If I had to choose--with an eye to having a really pleasant
life--between success and ruin, I should prefer ruin every time. I have
several friends who are completely ruined--some two or three times--in
a large way of course; and I find that if I want to get a really
good dinner, where the champagne is just as it ought to be, and where
hospitality is unhindered by mean thoughts of expense, I can get it best
at the house of a ruined man.

XVII. In Dry Toronto

A LOCAL STUDY OF A UNIVERSAL TOPIC

Note.--Our readers--our numerous readers--who live in Equatorial Africa,
may read this under the title "In Dry Timbucto"; those who live in
Central America will kindly call it "In Dry Tehauntepec."

It may have been, for aught I know, the change from a wet to a dry
atmosphere. I am told that, biologically, such things profoundly affect
the human system.

At any rate I found it impossible that night--I was on the train from
Montreal to Toronto--to fall asleep.

A peculiar wakefulness seemed to have seized upon me, which appeared,
moreover, to afflict the other passengers as well. In the darkness of
the car I could distinctly hear them groaning at intervals.

"Are they ill?" I asked, through the curtains, of the porter as he
passed.

"No, sir," he said, "they're not ill. Those is the Toronto passengers."

"All in this car?" I asked.

"All except that gen'lman you may have heard singing in the smoking
compartment. He's booked through to Chicago."

But, as is usual in such cases, sleep came at last with unusual
heaviness. I seemed obliterated from the world till, all of a sudden, I
found myself, as it were, up and dressed and seated in the observation
car at the back of the train, awaiting my arrival.

"Is this Toronto?" I asked of the Pullman conductor, as I peered through
the window of the car.

The conductor rubbed the pane with his finger and looked out.

"I think so," he said.

"Do we stop here