ys go to Europe who didn't
bring back a great deal except a few trunks of badly fitting
clothes._"]

You know how I began--I was started off with a kick, but that proved a
kick up, and in the end every one since has lifted me a little bit higher.
I got two dollars a week, and slept under the counter, and you can bet I
knew just how many pennies there were in each of those dollars, and how
hard the floor was. That is what you have got to learn.

I remember when I was on the Lakes, our schooner was passing out through
the draw at Buffalo when I saw little Bill Riggs, the butcher, standing
up above me on the end of the bridge with a big roast of beef in his
basket. They were a little short in the galley on that trip, so I called
up to Bill and he threw the roast down to me. I asked him how much, and
he yelled back, "about a dollar." That was mighty good beef, and when we
struck Buffalo again on the return trip, I thought I would like a little
more of it. So I went up to Bill's shop and asked him for a piece of the
same. But this time he gave me a little roast, not near so big as the
other, and it was pretty tough and stringy. But when I asked him how
much, he answered "about a dollar." He simply didn't have any sense of
values, and that's the business man's sixth sense. Bill has always been
a big, healthy, hard-working man, but to-day he is very, very poor.

The Bills ain't all in the butcher business. I've got some of them right
now in my office, but they will never climb over the railing that
separates the clerks from the executives. Yet if they would put in half
the time thinking for the house that they give up to hatching out
reasons why they ought to be allowed to overdraw their salary accounts,
I couldn't keep them out of our private offices with a pole-ax, and I
wouldn't want to; for they could double their salaries and my profits in
a year. But I always lay it down as a safe proposition that the fellow
who has to break open the baby's bank toward the last of the week for
car-fare isn't going to be any Russell Sage when it comes to trading
with the old man's money. He'd punch my bank account as full of holes as
a carload of wild Texans would a fool stockman that they'd got in a
corner.

Now I know you'll say that I don't understand how it is; that you've got
to do as the other fellows do; and that things have changed since I was
a boy. There's nothing in it. Adam invented all the different ways in
which a young