like the collegiate into the proof-room, convinced that they could do
what good business men know to be impossible,--that is take in eight
dollars a day and pay fifty dollars rent, on forty per cent profit.
Here and there is a grocer who gets up at half past five in the morning,
opens up, puts out his eggs, oranges, berries, lemons, potatoes, beans,
and bananas, sweeps out, gets out his horse, goes to the market-street,
does a day's buying there and elsewhere, and by eight o'clock is ready
for business, just about as the man who expects to share in trade with
him is unlocking his doors. Speak to the eight o'clock man and he will
tell you that he has to stay up till ten at night, and that he cannot
burn the candle of life at both ends. But, for all that, he is
grievously disappointed when the final collapse comes. Nothing succeeds
like success because very few things are like success. Nothing on the
street succeeds like this grocery, because nowhere else on the street is
so much work done by so few men. Nowhere else does the proprietor put
all of his time and his money into his business, and, in strawberry
time, for instance, retail thirty-five dollars' worth of strawberries in
one day with only one clerk, one delivery-boy and a cashier! At the same
time, this successful grocer would not invest one cent in the store-room
opposite, where, with so much confidence, the eight-o'clock man has put
all his money.