ccord from every retailer they shipped it to. The first
fellow will be lying, and the second will be exaggerating, and the third
may be telling the truth. With him you must settle on the spot; but
always remember that a man who's making a claim never underestimates his
case, and that you can generally compromise for something less than the
first figure. With the second you must sympathize, and say that the
matter will be reported to headquarters and the boss of the canning-room
called up on the carpet and made to promise that it will never happen
again. With the first you needn't bother. There's no use feeding expensive
"hen food" to an old Dominick that sucks eggs. The chances are that the
car weighed out more than it was billed, and that the fellow played the
hose on it himself and added a thousand pounds of cheap salt before he
jobbed it out to his trade.

Where you're going to slip up at first is in knowing which is which, but
if you don't learn pretty quick you'll not travel very far for the
house. For your own satisfaction I will say right here that you may know
you are in a fair way of becoming a good drummer by three things:

First--When you send us Orders.

Second--More Orders.

Third--Big Orders.

If you do this you won't have a great deal of time to write long
letters, and we won't have a great deal of time to read them, for we
will be very, very busy here making and shipping the goods. We aren't
specially interested in orders that the other fellow gets, or in knowing
how it happened after it has happened. If you like life on the road you
simply won't let it happen. So just send us your address every day and
your orders. They will tell us all that we want to know about "the
situation."

I was cured of sending information to the house when I was very, very
young--in fact, on the first trip which I made on the road. I was
traveling out of Chicago for Hammer & Hawkins, wholesale dry-goods,
gents' furnishings and notions. They started me out to round up trade in
the river towns down Egypt ways, near Cairo.

I hadn't more than made my first town and sized up the population before
I began to feel happy, because I saw that business ought to be very good
there. It appeared as if everybody in that town needed something in my
line. The clerk of the hotel where I registered wore a dicky and his
cuffs were tied to his neck by pieces of string run up his sleeves, and
most of the merchants on Main Street were in th