u want?" asked Daly at last.

"Yes, sir," blurted the big man. "If I come down here and tell you I
want three days off and fifty dollars to bury my mother, I wish you'd
tell me to go to hell! I buried her three times last winter!"

Daly chuckled a little.

"All right, Bub," said he, "to hell it is."

The man went out. Daly turned to Thorpe with the last flickers of
amusement in his eyes.

"What can I do for you?" he inquired in a little crisper tones. Thorpe
felt that he was not treated with the same careless familiarity,
because, potentially, he might be more of a force to deal with. He
underwent, too, the man's keen scrutiny, and knew that every detail of
his appearance had found its comment in the other's experienced brain.

"I am looking for work," Thorpe replied.

"What kind of work?"

"Any kind, so I can learn something about the lumber business."

The older man studied him keenly for a few moments.

"Have you had any other business experience?"

"None."

"What have you been doing?"

"Nothing."

The lumberman's eyes hardened.

"We are a very busy firm here," he said with a certain deliberation; "we
do not carry a big force of men in any one department, and each
of those men has to fill his place and slop some over the sides. We do
not pretend or attempt to teach here. If you want to be a lumberman, you
must learn the lumber business more directly than through the windows of
a bookkeeper's office. Go into the woods. Learn a few first principles.
Find out the difference between Norway and white pine, anyway."

Daly, being what is termed a self-made man, entertained a prejudice
against youths of the leisure class. He did not believe in their
earnestness of purpose, their capacity for knowledge, nor their
perseverance in anything. That a man of twenty-six should be looking for
his first situation was incomprehensible to him. He made no effort to
conceal his prejudice, because the class to which the young man had
belonged enjoyed his hearty contempt.

The truth is, he had taken Thorpe's ignorance a little too much for
granted. Before leaving his home, and while the project of emigration
was still in the air, the young fellow had, with the quiet enthusiasm of
men of his habit of mind, applied himself to the mastering of whatever
the books could teach. That is not much. The literature on lumbering
seems to be singularly limited. Still he knew the trees, and had
sketched an outline into which to pain