o go on the road, or something of that sort. Now, what do you
say?"

I can't say that Checkers seemed wholly delighted. He looked anywhere
but into my eyes and finally said he "would like a job, but he did n't
believe I could get him one."

I replied that I was sure I could, as my uncle was a wholesale
dry-goods merchant, and I had several friends who were heads of
departments in other large stores of various kinds.

"Well, we 'll try it and see," he said resignedly, "but I 'll tell you
just about how it is. A guy goes into a wholesale house and he starts
at the bottom in some department. He gets up at the break of day, and
he works like the devil after a Christian. If he has good luck he do
n't get 'fired,' but he never gets a raise on earth, unless the mug
above him dies, or breaks down his health and has to quit.

"Why, I knew a joker who worked in a certain big store in this town for
fifteen years. He lived somewhere way out in the suburbs, and he told
me he had to get down so early, that when he was coming home at night
he used to meet himself starting down in the morning. Well, one day
some one gave him a pass to the Harlem track--one Saturday afternoon.
He went to the races for the first time in his life. I got ahold of
him and made him win three hundred dollars with a five-dollar bill, and
you ought to have heard the talk he put up. 'Has this game been going
on all this time,' he says, 'with me doing the Rip Van Winkle act?
Why, I 'd be worth all kinds of money now, if I 'd had any sense.' And
Monday he went down and threw up his job, and started in to play the
ponies. Of course he went broke, but not long ago he struck a streak,
and made a killin'. He started in to making a book, and now he's got a
stable with five good sprinters, and a twenty thousand dollar
bank-roll. If he had stuck to his job in that store, he 'd have
probably had nervous prostration by this time."

"But the case you cite, Checkers, is one in a thousand," I said,
smiling broadly in spite of myself. "While that one man may have made
a success of a very questionable sort through unusual luck, or unusual
shrewdness, there have numberless others gone to ruin--utter,
irretrievable ruin, by giving way to their passion for gambling.

"If you object to a wholesale house, I may perhaps find something else
for you to do. But it seems to me to be simply a shame that a boy of
your ability and brains should be content to be nothing