g for tare, though, if he still nets ten I'll feel that he's a
credit to the brand.

It's a great thing to be sixty minutes old, with nothing in the world
except a blanket and an appetite, and the whole fight ahead of you;
but it's pretty good, too, to be sixty years old, and a grandpop, with
twenty years of fight left in you still. It sort of makes me feel,
though, as if it were almost time I had a young fellow hitched up
beside me who was strong enough to pull his half of the load and
willing enough so that he'd keep the traces taut on his side. I don't
want any double-team arrangement where I have to pull the load and the
other horse, too. But you seem strong, and you act willing, so when I
get back I reckon we'll hitch for a little trial spin. A good partner
ought to be like a good wife--a source of strength to a man. But it
isn't reasonable to tie up with six, like a Mormon elder, and expect
that you're going to have half a dozen happy homes.

They say that there are three generations between shirt-sleeves and
shirt-sleeves in a good many families, but I don't want any such gap
as that in ours. I hope to live long enough to see the kid with us at
the Stock Yards, and all three of us with our coats off hustling to
make the business hum. If I shouldn't, you must keep the boy strong in
the faith. It makes me a little uneasy when I go to New York and see
the carryings-on of some of the old merchants' grandchildren. I don't
think it's true, as Andy says, that to die rich is to die disgraced,
but it's the case pretty often that to die rich is to be disgraced
afterward by a lot of light-weight heirs.

Every now and then some blame fool stops me on the street to say that
he supposes I've got to the point now where I'm going to quit and
enjoy myself; and when I tell him I've been enjoying myself for forty
years and am going to keep right on at it, he goes off shaking his
head and telling people I'm a money-grubber. He can't see that it's
the fellow who doesn't enjoy his work and who quits just because he's
made money that's the money-grubber; or that the man who keeps right
on is fighting for something more than a little sugar on his bread and
butter.

When a doctor reaches the point where he's got a likely little bunch
of dyspeptics giving him ten dollars apiece for telling them to eat
something different from what they have been eating, and to chew
it--people don't ask him why he doesn't quit and live on the interest