ner the wheat market of the world. That is all I paid him. I could
not borrow any more. I joined what he called a "pool." I think it must
have been a pool, for I know I fell in and got soaked!

That bump set me to thinking. My fever began to reduce. I got the
thirty-third degree in financial suckerdom for only eleven hundred
dollars.

I have always regarded Tom as one of my great school teachers. I have
always regarded the eleven hundred as the finest investment I had made
up to that time, for I got the most out of it. I do not feel hard
toward goldbrick men and "blue sky" venders. I sometimes feel that we
should endow them. How else can we save a sucker? You cannot tell him
anything, because he is naturally bright and knows better. You simply
have to trim him till he bleeds.

I Am Cured

It is worth eleven hundred dollars every day to know that one sentence,
You cannot get something for nothing. Life just begins to get juicy
when you know it. Today when I open a newspaper and see a big ad,
"Grasp a Fortune Now!" I will not do it! I stop my subscription to that
paper. I simply will not take a paper with that ad in it, for I have
graduated from that class.

I will not grasp a fortune now. Try me, I dare you! Bring a fortune
right up on this platform and put it down there on the floor. I will
not grasp it. Come away, it is a coffee-pot!

Today when somebody offers me much more than the legal rate of interest
I know he is no friend of our family.

If he offers me a hundred per cent. I call for the police!

Today when I get a confidential letter that starts out, "You have been
selected--" I never read farther than the word "selected." Meeting is
adjourned. I select the waste-basket. Here, get in there just as quick
as you can. I was selected!

O, Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son! Learn it early in life. The law of
compensation is never suspended. You only own what you earn. You can't
get something for nothing. If you do not learn it, you will have to be
"selected." There is no other way for you, because you are naturally
bright. When you get a letter, "You have been selected to receive a
thousand per cent. dividends," it means you have been selected to
receive this bunch of blisters because you look like the biggest sucker
on the local landscape.

The other night in a little town of perhaps a thousand, a banker took
me up into his office after the lecture in which I had related some of
the above exper