but a little smoke, and a smell of
burned money--your money.

If a fellow would stop to think, he would understand that when money
comes in so hard, it isn't reasonable to expect that it can go out and
find more easy. But the great trouble is that a good many small
investors don't stop to think, or else let plausible strangers do
their thinking for them. That's why most young men have tucked away
with their college diploma and the picture of their first girl, an
impressive deed to a lot in Nowhere-on-the-Nothingness, or a beautiful
certificate of stock in the Gushing Girlie Oil Well, that has never
gushed anything but lies and promises, or a lovely receipt for money
invested in one of these discretionary pools that are formed for the
higher education of indiscreet fools. While I reckon that every fellow
has one of these certificates of membership in The Great Society of
Suckers, I had hoped that you would buy yours for a little less than
the Highfaluting Lulu is going to cost you. Young men are told that
the first thousand dollars comes hard and that after that it comes
easier. So it does--just a thousand dollars plus interest easier; and
easier through all the increased efficiency that self-denial and
self-control have given you, and the larger salary they've made you
worth.

It doesn't seem like much when you take your savings' bank book around
at the end of the year and get a little thirty or forty dollars
interest added, or when you cash in the coupon on the bond that you've
bought; yet your bank book and your bond are still true to you. But if
you'd had your thousand in one of these 50 per cent. bleached blonde
schemes, it would have lit out long ago with a fellow whose ways were
more coaxing, leaving you the laugh and a mighty small lock of
peroxide gold hair. If you think that saving your first thousand
dollars is hard, you'll find that saving the second, after you've lost
the first, is hell and repeat.

You can't too soon make it a rule to invest only on your own _know_
and never on somebody else's say so. You may lose some profits by this
policy, but you're bound to miss a lot of losses. Often the best
reason for keeping out of a thing is that everybody else is going into
it. A crowd's always dangerous; it first pushes prices up beyond
reason and then down below common sense. The time to buy is before the
crowd comes in or after it gets out. It'll always come back to a good
thing when it's been pushed up a