h his own hands.
He remembered every article he had on his shelves and what it cost. He
bought nothing he could not pay for. There was one clerk besides the
boy. After George came, the merchant and his clerk made all the
memoranda on brown paper, and the items were duly copied into the ledger
by George Peabody.

I have been told that a man who writes pure Spencerian can never do
anything else. This, however, is a hasty generalization, put forth by a
party who wrote a Horace Greeley hand.

A country store is the place for a boy to learn merchandising. In such a
place he is never swallowed up by a department. He learns everything,
from shaking down the ashes in the big stove to buying and selling
fadeless calico. He becomes an expert with a nail-puller, knows
strictly fresh eggs from eggs, and learns how to adapt himself to the
whims, caprices and notions of the customers who know little and assume
much.

George Peabody slept in the attic over the store. He took his meals with
the Proctor family, and used to wipe the dishes for Mrs. Proctor. He
could wait on store, tend baby, wash a blue wagon, drive a "horse and
team" and say "backsshe!" in a way that would throw you off the front
seat when the horse stopped, if you didn't look out.

That is to say, he was a New England village boy, alive and alert to
every phase of village life--strong, rapid, willing, helpful. The
villager who knows too much gets "fresh" and falls a victim of arrested
development. The boy in a village who works, and then gets out into a
wider sphere at that critical period when the wanderlust strikes him, is
in the line of evolution.

George Peabody remained at Proctor's store until nine o'clock in the
evening of the day that marked the close of his four years of
apprenticeship. He was fifteen, and all tempting offers from Mr. Proctor
to pay him wages thereafter in real money were turned aside. He had a
new suit of clothes, five dollars in his pocket, and ambition in his
heart. He was going to be a draper, and eliminate all "W. I. Goods."

* * * * *

Over at Newburyport, George had a brother, David Peabody, who ran a
"draper's shop." That is to say, David Peabody was a drygoods merchant.
This was a comparatively new thing in America, for a "store," at that
time, usually kept everything that people wanted. The exclusive draper
idea came from London. It seemed to work in Boston, and so Newburyport
tried it.

Davi