for you to go on them.
Back up good looks by good character yourself, and make sure that the
other fellow does the same. A suspicious man makes trouble for himself,
but a cautious one saves it. Because there ain't any rotten apples in
the top layer, it ain't always safe to bet that the whole barrel is
sound.

[Illustration: "_When John L. Sullivan went through the stock yards, it
just simply shut down the plant._"]

A man doesn't snap up a horse just because he looks all right. As a
usual thing that only makes him wonder what really is the matter that
the other fellow wants to sell. So he leads the nag out into the middle
of a ten-acre lot, where the light will strike him good and strong, and
examines every hair of his hide, as if he expected to find it near-seal,
or some other base imitation; and he squints under each hoof for the
grand hailing sign of distress; and he peeks down his throat for dark
secrets. If the horse passes this degree the buyer drives him twenty or
thirty miles, expecting him to turn out a roarer, or to find that he
balks, or shies, or goes lame, or develops some other horse nonsense.
If after all that there are no bad symptoms, he offers fifty less than
the price asked, on general principles, and for fear he has missed
something.

Take men and horses, by and large, and they run pretty much the same.
There's nothing like trying a man in harness a while before you bind
yourself to travel very far with him.

I remember giving a nice-looking, clean-shaven fellow a job on the
billing-desk, just on his looks, but he turned out such a poor hand at
figures that I had to fire him at the end of a week. It seemed that the
morning he struck me for the place he had pawned his razor for fifteen
cents in order to get a shave. Naturally, if I had known that in the
first place I wouldn't have hired him as a human arithmetic.

Another time I had a collector that I set a heap of store by. Always
handled himself just right when he talked to you and kept himself
looking right up to the mark. His salary wasn't very big, but he had
such a persuasive way that he seemed to get a dollar and a half's worth
of value out of every dollar that he earned. Never crowded the fashions
and never gave 'em any slack. If sashes were the thing with summer
shirts, why Charlie had a sash, you bet, and when tight trousers were
the nobby trick in pants, Charlie wore his double reefed. Take him fore
and aft, Charlie looked all right