Your employer begins to talk of the fall plowing as soon as he can, but
the farmer goes over to your unscrupulous competitors in business,
relates to them the fact that his scrupulous attention to details has
saved him four dollars and seventy-five cents, and asks their opinion as
to whether or not an attempt were not made to cheat him. His listeners
talk about you in a mild-mannered way--
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer.
Off goes your customer in his lumber-wagon, carrying that gross libel
upon your place of business, to fill the prairies and the openings with
its brood of gossiped offspring, until, some day, it comes back that
your employer is a horsethief and has served a term in the penitentiary!
The errors which are often made in handling figures are just as
annoying. It is a trifling error to call eight and four thirteen, but it
often may disconcert an immense calculation. Like the pebble in the
shoe, small in itself, it may do great injury. Some years ago there
traveled through the country a genuine "lightning calculator." You could
put down any number, big or little, while his back was turned, and he
would turn again and mark the total with far greater rapidity than he
could speak, and he thought out the total far quicker than he could mark
it. Of course, he had a magic book to sell, but when you came to read
his magic book and see how he did it, you found it was the same old way,
only he was more expert than you. He could add four thousand two hundred
and twenty eight and three thousand six hundred and fifty four as easily
as you could forty two and thirty six, or perhaps four and three, so you
see that the scheme of running up a single column of figures is at best
a clumsy one.