ecause when it comes closing
time for me it will make it a heap easier to know that some one who
bears the name will take down the shutters in the morning.

Boys are a good deal like the pups that fellows sell on street
corners--they don't always turn out as represented. You buy a likely
setter pup and raise a spotted coach dog from it, and the promising son
of an honest butcher is just as like as not to turn out a poet or a
professor. I want to say in passing that I have no real prejudice
against poets, but I believe that, if you're going to be a Milton,
there's nothing like being a mute, inglorious one, as some fellow who
was a little sore on the poetry business once put it. Of course, a
packer who understands something about the versatility of cottonseed
oil need never turn down orders for lard because the run of hogs is
light, and a father who understands human nature can turn out an
imitation parson from a boy whom the Lord intended to go on the Board of
Trade. But on general principles it's best to give your cottonseed oil a
Latin name and to market it on its merits, and to let your boy follow
his bent, even if it leads him into the wheat pit. If a fellow has got
poetry in him it's bound to come out sooner or later in the papers or
the street cars; and the longer you keep it bottled up the harder it
comes, and the longer it takes the patient to recover. There's no easier
way to cure foolishness than to give a man leave to be foolish. And the
only way to show a fellow that he's chosen the wrong business is to let
him try it. If it really is the wrong thing you won't have to argue with
him to quit, and if it isn't you haven't any right to.

Speaking of bull-pups that turned out to be terriers naturally calls to
mind the case of my old friend Jeremiah Simpkins' son. There isn't a
solider man in the Boston leather trade than Jeremiah, nor a bigger
scamp that the law can't touch than his son Ezra. There isn't an ounce
of real meanness in Ezra's whole body, but he's just naturally and
unintentionally a maverick. When he came out of college his father
thought that a few years' experience in the hide department of Graham &
Co. would be a good thing for him before he tackled the leather
business. So I wrote to send him on and I would give him a job,
supposing, of course, that I was getting a yearling of the steady, old,
reliable Simpkins strain.

I was a little uneasy when Ezra reported, because he didn't just look
as i