_Dear Pierrepont:_ Well, I'm headed for home at last, checked high and
as full of prance as a spotted circus horse. Those Dutchmen ain't so bad
as their language, after all, for they've fixed up my rheumatism so that
I can bear down on my right leg without thinking that it's going to
break off.
I'm glad to learn from your letter that you're getting along so well in
your new place, and I hope that when I get home your boss will back up
all the good things which you say about yourself. For the future,
however, you needn't bother to keep me posted along this line. It's the
one subject on which most men are perfectly frank, and it's about the
only one on which it isn't necessary to be. There's never any use trying
to hide the fact that you're a jim-dandy--you're bound to be found out.
Of course, you want to have your eyes open all the time for a good man,
but follow the old maid's example--look under the bed and in the closet,
not in the mirror, for him. A man who does big things is too busy to
talk about them. When the jaws really need exercise, chew gum.
Some men go through life on the Sarsaparilla Theory--that they've got to
give a hundred doses of talk about themselves for every dollar which
they take in; and that's a pretty good theory when you're getting a
dollar for ten cents' worth of ingredients. But a man who's giving a
dollar's worth of himself for ninety-nine cents doesn't need to throw in
any explanations.
Of course, you're going to meet fellows right along who pass as good men
for a while, because they say they're good men; just as a lot of fives
are in circulation which are accepted at their face value until they
work up to the receiving teller. And you're going to see these men
taking buzzards and coining eagles from them that will fool people so
long as they can keep them in the air; but sooner or later they're bound
to swoop back to their dead horse, and you'll get the buzzard smell.
Hot air can take up a balloon a long ways, but it can't keep it there.
And when a fellow's turning flip-flops up among the clouds, he's
naturally going to have the farmers gaping at him. But in the end there
always comes a time when the parachute fails to work. I don't know
anything that's quite so dead as a man who's fallen three or four
thousand feet off the edge of a cloud.
The only way to gratify a taste for scenery is to climb a mountain. You
don't get up so quick, but you don't come down so sudden. Even then,
there's a chance that a fellow may slip and fall over a precipice, but
not unless he's foolish enough to try short-cuts over slippery places;
though some men can manage to fall down the hall stairs and break their
necks. The path isn't the shortest way to the top, but it's usually the
safest way.
Life isn't a spurt, but a long, steady climb. You can't run far up-hill
without stopping to sit down. Some men do a day's work and then spend
six lolling around admiring it. They rush at a thing with a whoop and
use up all their wind in that. And when they're rested and have got it
back, they whoop again and start off in a new direction. They mistake
intention for determination, and after they have told you what they
propose to do and get right up to doing it, they simply peter out.
I've heard a good deal in my time about the foolishness of hens, but
when it comes to right-down, plum foolishness, give me a rooster, every
time. He's always strutting and stretching and crowing and bragging
about things with which he had nothing to do. When the sun rises, you'd
think that he was making all the light, instead of all the noise; when
the farmer's wife throws the scraps in the henyard, he crows as if he
was the provider for the whole farmyard and was asking a blessing on the
food; when he meets another rooster, he crows; and when the other
rooster licks him, he crows; and so he keeps it up straight through the
day. He even wakes up during the night and crows a little on general
principles. But when you hear from a hen, she's laid an egg, and she
don't make a great deal of noise about it, either.
I speak of these things in a general way, because I want you to keep in
mind all the time that steady, quiet, persistent, plain work can't be
imitated or replaced by anything just as good, and because your request
for a job for Courtland Warrington naturally brings them up. You write
that Court says that a man who has occupied his position in the world
naturally can't cheapen himself by stepping down into any little
piddling job where he'd have to do undignified things.
I want to start right out by saying that I know Court and his whole
breed like a glue factory, and that we can't use him in our business.
He's one of those fellows who start in at the top and naturally work
down to the bottom, because that is where they belong. His father gave
him an interest in the concern when he left college, and since the old
man failed three years ago and took a salary himself, Court's been
sponging on him and waiting for a nice, dignified job to come along and
steal him. But we are not in the kidnapping business.
The only undignified job I know of is loafing, and nothing can cheapen a
man who sponges instead of hunting any sort of work, because he's as
cheap already as they can be made. I never could quite understand these
fellows who keep down every decent instinct in order to keep up
appearance, and who will stoop to any sort of real meanness to boost up
their false pride.
[Illustration: "_Jim Hicks dared Fatty Wilkins to eat a piece of
dirt._"]
They always remind me of little Fatty Wilkins, who came to live in our
town back in Missouri when I was a boy. His mother thought a heap of Fatty,
and Fatty thought a heap of himself, or his stomach, which was the same
thing. Looked like he'd been taken from a joke book. Used to be a great
eater. Stuffed himself till his hide was stretched as tight as a sausage
skin, and then howled for painkiller. Spent all his pennies for cakes,
because candy wasn't filling enough. Hogged 'em in the shop, for fear he
would have to give some one a bite if he ate them on the street.
The other boys didn't take to Fatty, and they didn't make any special
secret of it when he was around. He was a mighty brave boy and a mighty
strong boy and a mighty proud boy--with his mouth; but he always managed
to slip out of anything that looked like a fight by having a sore hand
or a case of the mumps. The truth of the matter was that he was afraid
of everything except food, and that was the thing which was hurting him
most. It's mighty seldom that a fellow's afraid of what he ought to be
afraid of in this world.
Of course, like most cowards, while Fatty always had an excuse for not
doing something that might hurt his skin, he would take a dare to do
anything that would hurt his self-respect, for fear the boys would laugh
at him, or say that he was afraid, if he refused. So one day during
recess Jim Hicks dared him to eat a piece of dirt. Fatty hesitated a
little, because, while he was pretty promiscuous about what he put into
his stomach, he had never included dirt in his bill-of-fare. But when
the boys began to say that he was afraid, Fatty up and swallowed it.
And when he dared the other boys to do the same thing and none of them
would take the dare, it made him mighty proud and puffed up. Got to
charging the bigger boys and the lounger around the post-office a cent
to see him eat a piece of dirt the size of a hickory-nut. Found there
was good money in that, and added grasshoppers, at two cents apiece, as
a side line. Found them so popular that he took on chinch bugs at a
nickel, and fairly coined money. The last I heard of Fatty he was in a
Dime Museum, drawing two salaries--one as "The Fat Man," and the other
as "Launcelot, The Locust Eater, the Only Man Alive with a Gizzard."
You are going to meet a heap of Fatties, first and last, fellows who'll
eat a little dirt "for fun" or to show off, and who'll eat a little more
because they find that there's some easy money or times in it. It's hard
to get at these men, because when they've lost everything they had to be
proud of, they still keep their pride. You can always bet that when a
fellow's pride makes him touchy, it's because there are some mighty raw
spots on it.
It's been my experience that pride is usually a spur to the strong and a
drag on the weak. It drives the strong man along and holds the weak one
back. It makes the fellow with the stiff upper lip and the square jaw
smile at a laugh and laugh at a sneer; it keeps his conscience straight
and his back humped over his work; it makes him appreciate the little
things and fight for the big ones. But it makes the fellow with the
retreating forehead do the thing that looks right, instead of the thing
that is right; it makes him fear a laugh and shrivel up at a sneer; it
makes him live to-day on to-morrow's salary; it makes him a cheap
imitation of some Willie who has a little more money than he has,
without giving him zip enough to go out and force luck for himself.
I never see one of these fellows swelling around with their petty
larceny pride that I don't think of a little experience of mine when I
was a boy. An old fellow caught me lifting a watermelon in his patch,
one afternoon, and instead of cuffing me and letting me go, as I had
expected if I got caught, he led me home by the ear to my ma, and told
her what I had been up to.
Your grandma had been raised on the old-fashioned plan, and she had
never heard of these new-fangled theories of reasoning gently with a
child till its under lip begins to stick out and its eyes to fill with
tears as it sees the error of its ways. She fetched the tears all right,
but she did it with a trunk strap or a slipper. And your grandma was a
pretty substantial woman. Nothing of the tootsey-wootsey about her foot,
and nothing of the airy-fairy trifle about her slipper. When she was
through I knew that I'd been licked--polished right off to a point--and
then she sent me to my room and told me not to poke my nose out of it
till I could recite the Ten Commandments and the Sunday-school lesson by
heart.
There was a whole chapter of it, and an Old Testament chapter at that,
but I laid right into it because I knew ma, and supper was only two
hours off. I can repeat that chapter still, forward and backward,
without missing a word or stopping to catch my breath.
Every now and then old Doc Hoover used to come into the Sunday-school
room and scare the scholars into fits by going around from class to
class and asking questions. That next Sunday, for the first time, I was
glad to see him happen in, and I didn't try to escape attention when he
worked around to our class. For ten minutes I'd been busting for him to
ask me to recite a verse of the lesson, and, when he did, I simply cut
loose and recited the whole chapter and threw in the Ten Commandments
for good measure. It sort of dazed the Doc, because he had come to me
for information about the Old Testament before, and we'd never got much
beyond, And Ahab begat Jahab, or words to that effect. But when he got
over the shock he made me stand right up before the whole school and do
it again. Patted me on the head and said I was "an honor to my parents
and an example to my playmates."
I had been looking down all the time, feeling mighty proud and scared,
but at that I couldn't help glancing up to see the other boys admire me.
But the first person my eye lit on was your grandma, standing in the
back of the room, where she had stopped for a moment on her way up to
church, and glaring at me in a mighty unpleasant way.
"Tell 'em, John," she said right out loud, before everybody.
There was no way to run, for the Elder had hold of my hand, and there
was no place to hide, though I reckon I could have crawled into a rat
hole. So, to gain time, I blurted out:
"Tell 'em what, mam?"
"Tell 'em how you come to have your lesson so nice."
I learned to hate notoriety right then and there, but I knew there was
no switching her off on to the weather when she wanted to talk
religion. So I shut my eyes and let it come, though it caught on my
palate once or twice on the way out.
"Hooked a watermelon, mam."
There wasn't any need for further particulars with that crowd, and they
simply howled. Ma led me up to our pew, allowing that she'd tend to me
Monday for disgracing her in public that way--and she did.
That was a twelve-grain dose, without any sugar coat, but it sweat more
cant and false pride out of my system than I could get back into it for
the next twenty years. I learned right there how to be humble, which is
a heap more important than knowing how to be proud. There are mighty few
men that need any lessons in that.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
+-----------------------------+
| No. 18 |
+-----------------------------+
| From John Graham, at the |
| London House of Graham & |
| Co., to his son, |
| Pierrepont, at the Union |
| Stock Yards in Chicago. |
| Mr. Pierrepont is worried |
| over rumors that the old |
| man is a bear on lard, |
| and that the longs are |
| about to make him climb a |
| tree. |
+-----------------------------+