very, very important that you shouldn't lose sight of your
own. Authority swells up some fellows so that they can't see their
corns; but a wise man tries to cure his own while remembering not to
tread on his neighbors'.

[Illustration: "_A good many salesmen have an idea that buyers are only
interested in funny stories._"]

In this connection, the story of Lemuel Hostitter, who kept the corner
grocery in my old town, naturally comes to mind. Lem was probably the
meanest white man in the State of Missouri, and it wasn't any walk-over
to hold the belt in those days. Most grocers were satisfied to adulterate
their coffee with ground peas, but Lem was so blamed mean that he
adulterated the peas first. Bought skin-bruised hams and claimed that
the bruise was his private and particular brand, stamped in the skin,
showing that they were a fancy article, packed expressly for his fancy
family trade. Ran a soda-water fountain in the front of his store with
home-made syrups that ate the lining out of the children's stomachs, and
a blind tiger in the back room with moonshine whiskey that pickled their
daddies' insides. Take it by and large, Lem's character smelled about as
various as his store, and that wasn't perfumed with lily-of-the-valley,
you bet.

One time and another most men dropped into Lem's store of an evening,
because there wasn't any other place to go and swap lies about the crops
and any of the neighbors who didn't happen to be there. As Lem was
always around, in the end he was the only man in town whose meanness
hadn't been talked over in that grocery. Naturally, he began to think
that he was the only decent white man in the county. Got to shaking his
head and reckoning that the town was plum rotten. Said that such goings
on would make a pessimist of a goat. Wanted to know if public opinion
couldn't be aroused so that decency would have a show in the village.

Most men get information when they ask for it, and in the end Lem
fetched public opinion all right. One night the local chapter of the
W.C.T.U. borrowed all the loose hatchets in town and made a good, clean,
workmanlike job of the back part of his store, though his whiskey was so
mean that even the ground couldn't soak it up. The noise brought out the
men, and they sort of caught the spirit of the happy occasion. When they
were through, Lem's stock and fixtures looked mighty sick, and they had
Lem on a rail headed for the county line.

I don't know when I