e in; and that's a pretty good theory when you're getting a
dollar for ten cents' worth of ingredients. But a man who's giving a
dollar's worth of himself for ninety-nine cents doesn't need to throw in
any explanations.

Of course, you're going to meet fellows right along who pass as good men
for a while, because they say they're good men; just as a lot of fives
are in circulation which are accepted at their face value until they
work up to the receiving teller. And you're going to see these men
taking buzzards and coining eagles from them that will fool people so
long as they can keep them in the air; but sooner or later they're bound
to swoop back to their dead horse, and you'll get the buzzard smell.

Hot air can take up a balloon a long ways, but it can't keep it there.
And when a fellow's turning flip-flops up among the clouds, he's
naturally going to have the farmers gaping at him. But in the end there
always comes a time when the parachute fails to work. I don't know
anything that's quite so dead as a man who's fallen three or four
thousand feet off the edge of a cloud.

The only way to gratify a taste for scenery is to climb a mountain. You
don't get up so quick, but you don't come down so sudden. Even then,
there's a chance that a fellow may slip and fall over a precipice, but
not unless he's foolish enough to try short-cuts over slippery places;
though some men can manage to fall down the hall stairs and break their
necks. The path isn't the shortest way to the top, but it's usually the
safest way.

Life isn't a spurt, but a long, steady climb. You can't run far up-hill
without stopping to sit down. Some men do a day's work and then spend
six lolling around admiring it. They rush at a thing with a whoop and
use up all their wind in that. And when they're rested and have got it
back, they whoop again and start off in a new direction. They mistake
intention for determination, and after they have told you what they
propose to do and get right up to doing it, they simply peter out.

I've heard a good deal in my time about the foolishness of hens, but
when it comes to right-down, plum foolishness, give me a rooster, every
time. He's always strutting and stretching and crowing and bragging
about things with which he had nothing to do. When the sun rises, you'd
think that he was making all the light, instead of all the noise; when
the farmer's wife throws the scraps in the henyard, he crows as if he
was the prov