alf cured. When it has soaked in all the pickle that it
can, it has to sweat out most of it in the smoke-house before it is any
real good; and when you've soaked up all the information you can hold,
you will have to forget half of it before you will be of any real use to
the house. If there's anything worse than knowing too little, it's
knowing too much. Education will broaden a narrow mind, but there's no
known cure for a big head. The best you can hope is that it will swell
up and bust; and then, of course, there's nothing left. Poverty never
spoils a good man, but prosperity often does. It's easy to stand hard
times, because that's the only thing you can do, but in good times the
fool-killer has to do night work.

I simply mention these things in a general way. A good many of them
don't apply to you, no doubt, but it won't do any harm to make sure.
Most men get cross-eyed when they come to size themselves up, and see
an angel instead of what they're trying to look at. There's nothing that
tells the truth to a woman like a mirror, or that lies harder to a man.

What I am sure of is that you have got the sulks too quick. If you knew
all that you'll have to learn before you'll be a big, broad-gauged
merchant, you might have something to be sulky about.

When you've posted yourself properly about the business you'll have
taken a step in the right direction--you will be able to get your
buyer's attention. All the other steps are those which lead you into his
confidence.

Right here you will discover that you are in the fix of the young fellow
who married his best girl and took her home to live with his mother. He
found that the only way in which he could make one happy was by making
the other mad, and that when he tried to make them both happy he only
succeeded in making them both mad. Naturally, in the end, his wife
divorced him and his mother disinherited him, and left her money to an
orphan asylum, because, as she sensibly observed in the codicil,
"orphans can not be ungrateful to their parents." But if the man had had
a little tact he would have kept them in separate houses, and have let
each one think that she was getting a trifle the best of it, without
really giving it to either.

Tact is the knack of keeping quiet at the right time; of being so
agreeable yourself that no one can be disagreeable to you; of making
inferiority feel like equality. A tactful man can pull the stinger from
a bee without getting stun