d me up to see if the weight
of my pocketbook made my coat sag.

"How much is it?" asked your ma.

"Fifty dollars," said the girl, as bright and sassy as you please.

"I'm not such a simple little shepherdess as that," answered your ma,
just a little brighter and a little sassier, and she's going around
bareheaded. She's doing the cooking and making the beds, because the
white girls from the North aren't willing to do "both of them works,"
and the native niggers don't seem to care a great deal about doing any
work. And I'm splitting the wood for the kitchen stove, and an
occasional fish that has committed suicide. This morning, when I was
casting through the surf, a good-sized drum chased me up on shore, and
he's now the star performer in a chowder that your ma has billed for
dinner.

They call this place a villa, though it's really a villainy; and what
I pay for it rent, though it's actually a robbery. But they can have
the last bill in the roll if they'll leave me your ma, and my
appetite, and that tired feeling at night. It's the bulliest time
we've had since the spring we moved into our first little cottage back
in Missouri, and raised climbing-roses and our pet pig, Toby. It's
good to have money and the things that money will buy, but it's good,
too, to check up once in a while and make sure you haven't lost the
things that money won't buy. When a fellow's got what he set out for
in this world, he should go off into the woods for a few weeks now and
then to make sure that he's still a man, and not a plug-hat and a
frock-coat and a wad of bills.

You can't do the biggest things in this world unless you can handle
men; and you can't handle men if you're not in sympathy with them; and
sympathy begins in humility. I don't mean the humility that crawls for
a nickel in the street and cringes for a thousand in the office; but
the humility that a man finds when he goes gunning in the woods for
the truth about himself. It's the sort of humility that makes a fellow
proud of a chance to work in the world, and want to be a square
merchant, or a good doctor, or an honest lawyer, before he's a rich
one. It makes him understand that while life is full of opportunities
for him, it's full of responsibilities toward the other fellow, too.

That doesn't mean that you ought to coddle idleness, or to be slack
with viciousness, or even to carry on the pay-roll well-meaning
incompetence. For a fellow who mixes business and charity