_Dear Pierrepont:_ Perhaps it's just as well that I had to hurry last
night to make my train, and so had no time to tell you some things that
are laying mighty heavy on my mind this morning.
Jim Donnelly, of the Donnelly Provision Company, came into the office in
the afternoon, with a fool grin on his fat face, to tell me that while
he appreciated a note which he had just received in one of the firm's
envelopes, beginning "Dearest," and containing an invitation to the
theatre to-morrow night, it didn't seem to have any real bearing on his
claim for shortage on the last carload of sweet pickled hams he had
bought from us.
Of course, I sent for Milligan and went for him pretty rough for having
a mailing clerk so no-account as to be writing personal letters in
office hours, and such a blunderer as to mix them up with the firm's
correspondence. Milligan just stood there like a dumb Irishman and let
me get through and go back and cuss him out all over again, with some
trimmings that I had forgotten the first time, before he told me that
you were the fellow who had made the bull. Naturally, I felt pretty
foolish, and, while I tried to pass it off with something about your
still being green and raw, the ice was mighty thin, and you had the
old man running tiddledies.
It didn't make me feel any sweeter about the matter to hear that when
Milligan went for you, and asked what you supposed Donnelly would think
of that sort of business, you told him to "consider the feelings of the
girl who got our brutal refusal to allow a claim for a few hundredweight
of hams."
I haven't any special objection to your writing to girls and telling
them that they are the real sugar-cured article, for, after all, if you
overdo it, it's your breach-of-promise suit, but you must write before
eight or after six. I have bought the stretch between those hours. Your
time is money--my money--and when you take half an hour of it for your
own purposes, that is just a petty form of petty larceny.
Milligan tells me that you are quick to learn, and that you can do a
powerful lot of work when you've a mind to; but he adds that it's mighty
seldom your mind takes that particular turn. Your attention may be on
the letters you are addressing, or you may be in a comatose condition
mentally; he never quite knows until the returns come from the
dead-letter office.
A man can't have his head pumped out like a vacuum pan, or stuffed full
of odds and ends like a bologna sausage, and do his work right. It
doesn't make any difference how mean and trifling the thing he's doing
may seem, that's the big thing and the only thing for him just then.
Business is like oil--it won't mix with anything but business.
You can resolve everything in the world, even a great fortune, into
atoms. And the fundamental principles which govern the handling of
postage stamps and of millions are exactly the same. They are the common
law of business, and the whole practice of commerce is founded on them.
They are so simple that a fool can't learn them; so hard that a lazy man
won't.
Boys are constantly writing me for advice about how to succeed, and when
I send them my receipt they say that I am dealing out commonplace
generalities. Of course I am, but that's what the receipt calls for, and
if a boy will take these commonplace generalities and knead them into
his job, the mixture'll be cake.
[Illustration: "_Jim Donnelly of the Donnelly Provision Company came
into my office with a fool grin on his fat face._"]
Once a fellow's got the primary business virtues cemented into his
character, he's safe to build on. But when a clerk crawls into the
office in the morning like a sick setter pup, and leaps from his stool
at night with the spring of a tiger, I'm a little afraid that if I sent
him off to take charge of a branch house he wouldn't always be around
when customers were. He's the sort of a chap who would hold back the sun
an hour every morning and have it gain two every afternoon if the Lord
would give him the same discretionary powers that He gave Joshua. And I
have noticed that he's the fellow who invariably takes a timekeeper as an
insult. He's pretty numerous in business offices; in fact, if the glance
of the human eye could affect a clockface in the same way that a man's
country cousins affect their city welcome, I should have to buy a new
timepiece for the office every morning.
I remember when I was a boy, we used to have a pretty lively
camp-meeting every summer, and Elder Hoover, who was accounted a
powerful exhorter in our parts, would wrastle with the sinners and the
backsliders. There was one old chap in the town--Bill Budlong--who took
a heap of pride in being the simon pure cuss. Bill was always the last
man to come up to the mourners' bench at the camp-meeting and the first
one to backslide when it was over. Used to brag around about what a
hold Satan had on him and how his sin was the original brand, direct
from Adam, put up in cans to keep, and the can-opener lost. Doc Hoover
would get the whole town safe in the fold and then have to hold extra
meetings for a couple of days to snake in that miserable Bill; but, in
the end, he always got religion and got it hard. For a month or two
afterward, he'd make the chills run down the backs of us children in
prayer-meeting, telling how he had probably been the triflingest and
orneriest man alive before he was converted. Then, along toward
hog-killing time, he'd backslide, and go around bragging that he was
standing so close to the mouth of the pit that his whiskers smelt of
brimstone.
He kept this up for about ten years, getting vainer and vainer of his
staying qualities, until one summer, when the Elder had rounded up all
the likeliest sinners in the bunch, he announced that the meetings were
over for that year.
You never saw a sicker-looking man than Bill when he heard that there
wasn't going to be any extra session for him. He got up and said he
reckoned another meeting would fetch him; that he sort of felt the
clutch of old Satan loosening; but Doc Hoover was firm. Then Bill begged
to have a special deacon told off to wrastle with him, but Doc wouldn't
listen to that. Said he'd been wasting time enough on him for ten years
to save a county, and he had just about made up his mind to let him try
his luck by himself; that what he really needed more than religion was
common-sense and a conviction that time in this world was too valuable
to be frittered away. If he'd get that in his head he didn't think he'd
be so apt to trifle with eternity; and if he didn't get it, religion
wouldn't be of any special use to him.
A big merchant finds himself in Doc Hoover's fix pretty often. There are
too many likely young sinners in his office to make it worth while to
bother long with the Bills. Very few men are worth wasting time on
beyond a certain point, and that point is soon reached with a fellow who
doesn't show any signs of wanting to help. Naturally, a green man always
comes to a house in a pretty subordinate position, and it isn't possible
to make so much noise with a firecracker as with a cannon. But you can
tell a good deal by what there is left of the boy, when you come to
inventory him on the fifth of July, whether he'll be safe to trust with
a cannon next year.
It isn't the little extra money that you may make for the house by
learning the fundamental business virtues which counts so much as it is
the effect that it has on your character and that of those about you,
and especially on the judgment of the old man when he's casting around
for the fellow to fill the vacancy just ahead of you. He's pretty apt to
pick some one who keeps separate ledger accounts for work and for fun,
who gives the house sixteen ounces to the pound, and, on general
principles, to pass by the one who is late at the end where he ought to
be early, and early at the end where he ought to be late.
I simply mention these things in passing, but, frankly, I am afraid that
you have a streak of the Bill in you; and you can't be a good clerk, let
alone a partner, until you get it out. I try not to be narrow when I'm
weighing up a young fellow, and to allow for soakage and leakage, and
then to throw in a little for good feeling; but I don't trade with a
man whom I find deliberately marking up the weights on me.
This is a fine country we're running through, but it's a pity that it
doesn't raise more hogs. It seems to take a farmer a long time to learn
that the best way to sell his corn is on the hoof.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
P.S. I just had to allow Donnelly his claim on those hams, though I was
dead sure our weights were right, and it cost the house sixty dollars.
But your fool letter took all the snap out of our argument. I get hot
every time I think of it.
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| No. 7 |
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| From John Graham, at the |
| Omaha Branch of Graham & |
| Co., to Pierrepont Graham, |
| at the Union Stock Yards, |
| Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont |
| hasn't found the methods |
| of the worthy Milligan |
| altogether to his liking, |
| and he has commented |
| rather freely on them. |
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