for--initiative.

The other girls "got done." When they had finished the work they had
been put at, they would wait--O, so patiently they would wait--to be
told what to do next.

Within three months every other girl in that office was asking
questions of the little Dutch girl. She had learned more about business
in three months than the others had learned in all the time they had
been there. Nothing ever escaped her. She had become the most capable
girl in the office.

The barrel did the rest. Today she is giving orders to all of them, for
she is the office superintendent.

The other girls feel hurt about it. They will tell you in confidence
that it was the rankest favoritism ever known. "There was nothing fair
about it. Jennie ought to have been made superintendent. Jennie had
been here four years."

The "Unlucky" One

The other day in a paper-mill I was standing beside a long machine
making shiny super-calendered paper. I asked the man working there some
questions about the machine, which he answered fairly well. Then I
asked him about a machine in the next room. He said, "I don't know
nothing about it, boss, I don't work in there."

I asked him about another process, and he replied, "I don't know
nothing about it, I never worked in there." I asked him about the
pulpmill. He replied, "No, I don't know nothing about that, neither. I
don't work in there." And he did not betray the least desire to know
anything about anything.

"How long have you worked here?"

"About twelve years."

Going out of the building, I asked the foreman, "Do you see that man
over there at the supercalendered machine?" pointing to the man who
didn't know. "Is he a human being?"

The foreman's face clouded. "I hate to talk to you about that man. He
is one of the kindest-hearted men we ever had in the works, but we've
got to let him go. We're afraid he'll break the machine. He isn't
interested, does not learn, doesn't try to learn."

So he had begun to rattle. Nobody can stay where he rattles. It is grow
or go.

Life's Barrel the Leveler

So books could be filled with just such stories of how people have gone
up and down. You may have noticed two brothers start with the same
chance, and presently notice that one is going up and the other is
going down.

Some of us begin life on the top branches, right in the sunshine of
popular favor, and get our names in the blue-book at the start. Some of
us begin down in th