exactly the same. They are the common
law of business, and the whole practice of commerce is founded on them.
They are so simple that a fool can't learn them; so hard that a lazy man
won't.

Boys are constantly writing me for advice about how to succeed, and when
I send them my receipt they say that I am dealing out commonplace
generalities. Of course I am, but that's what the receipt calls for, and
if a boy will take these commonplace generalities and knead them into
his job, the mixture'll be cake.

[Illustration: "_Jim Donnelly of the Donnelly Provision Company came
into my office with a fool grin on his fat face._"]

Once a fellow's got the primary business virtues cemented into his
character, he's safe to build on. But when a clerk crawls into the
office in the morning like a sick setter pup, and leaps from his stool
at night with the spring of a tiger, I'm a little afraid that if I sent
him off to take charge of a branch house he wouldn't always be around
when customers were. He's the sort of a chap who would hold back the sun
an hour every morning and have it gain two every afternoon if the Lord
would give him the same discretionary powers that He gave Joshua. And I
have noticed that he's the fellow who invariably takes a timekeeper as an
insult. He's pretty numerous in business offices; in fact, if the glance
of the human eye could affect a clockface in the same way that a man's
country cousins affect their city welcome, I should have to buy a new
timepiece for the office every morning.

I remember when I was a boy, we used to have a pretty lively
camp-meeting every summer, and Elder Hoover, who was accounted a
powerful exhorter in our parts, would wrastle with the sinners and the
backsliders. There was one old chap in the town--Bill Budlong--who took
a heap of pride in being the simon pure cuss. Bill was always the last
man to come up to the mourners' bench at the camp-meeting and the first
one to backslide when it was over. Used to brag around about what a
hold Satan had on him and how his sin was the original brand, direct
from Adam, put up in cans to keep, and the can-opener lost. Doc Hoover
would get the whole town safe in the fold and then have to hold extra
meetings for a couple of days to snake in that miserable Bill; but, in
the end, he always got religion and got it hard. For a month or two
afterward, he'd make the chills run down the backs of us children in
prayer-meeting, telling how he had proba