saying that
boys don't need to know anything except addition and the "best policy"
brand of honesty.

We started in a mighty different world, and we were all ignorant
together. The Lord let us in on the ground floor, gave us corner lots,
and then started in to improve the adjacent property. We didn't have to
know fractions to figure out our profits. Now a merchant needs astronomy
to see them, and when he locates them they are out somewhere near the
fifth decimal place. There are sixteen ounces to the pound still, but
two of them are wrapping paper in a good many stores. And there're just
as many chances for a fellow as ever, but they're a little gun shy, and
you can't catch them by any such coarse method as putting salt on their
tails.

Thirty years ago, you could take an old muzzle-loader and knock over
plenty of ducks in the city limits, and Chicago wasn't Cook County then,
either. You can get them still, but you've got to go to Kankakee and
take a hammerless along. And when I started in the packing business it
was all straight sailing--no frills--just turning hogs into hog
meat--dry salt for the niggers down South and sugar-cured for the white
folks up North. Everything else was sausage, or thrown away. But when we
get through with a hog nowadays, he's scattered through a hundred
different cans and packages, and he's all accounted for. What we used to
throw away is our profit. It takes doctors, lawyers, engineers, poets,
and I don't know what, to run the business, and I reckon that
improvements which call for parsons will be creeping in next. Naturally,
a young man who expects to hold his own when he is thrown in with a lot
of men like these must be as clean and sharp as a hound's tooth, or some
other fellow's simply going to eat him up.

The first college man I ever hired was old John Durham's son, Jim. That
was a good many years ago when the house was a much smaller affair.
Jim's father had a lot of money till he started out to buck the universe
and corner wheat. And the boy took all the fancy courses and trimmings
at college. The old man was mighty proud of Jim. Wanted him to be a
literary fellow. But old Durham found out what every one learns who gets
his ambitions mixed up with number two red--that there's a heap of it
lying around loose in the country. The bears did quick work and kept the
cash wheat coming in so lively that one settling day half a dozen of us
had to get under the market to keep it from goin