gainst their better judgment that he went to Heaven, and
the father's estimate of the son, on which he is trying to pass him
along into a good salary, will be conservative.

I had that driven into my mind and spiked down when I hired the widow's
son a few years ago. His name was Clarence--Clarence St. Clair
Hicks--and his father used to keep books for me when he wasn't picking
the winners at Washington Park or figuring out the batting averages of
the Chicagos. He was one of those quick men who always have their books
posted up half an hour before closing time for three weeks of the month,
and spend the evenings of the fourth hunting up the eight cents that
they are out on the trial balance. When he died his wife found that his
life insurance had lapsed the month before, and so she brought Clarence
down to the office and asked me to give him a job.

Clarence wasn't exactly a pretty boy; in fact, he looked to me like
another of his father's bad breaks; but his mother seemed to think a
heap of him. I learned that he would have held the belt in his
Sunday-school for long-distance verse-reciting if the mother of one of
the other boys hadn't fixed the superintendent, and that it had taken a
general conspiracy of the teachers in his day-school to keep him from
walking off with the good-conduct medal.

I couldn't just reconcile those statements with Clarence's face, but I
accepted him at par and had him passed along to the head errand boy. His
mother cried a little when she saw him marched off, and asked me to see
that he was treated kindly and wasn't bullied by the bigger boys,
because he had been "raised a pet."

A number of unusual things happened in the offices that morning, and the
head office boy thought Clarence might be able to explain some of them,
but he had an alibi ready every time--even when a bookkeeper found the
vault filled with cigarette smoke and Clarence in it hunting for
something he couldn't describe. But as he was a new boy, no one was
disposed to bear down on him very hard, so his cigarettes were taken
away from him and he was sent back to his bench with a warning that he
had used up all his explanations.

Along toward noon, a big Boston customer came in with his little boy--a
nice, plump, stall-fed youngster, with black velvet pants and hair that
was just a little longer than was safe in the stock-yards district. And
while we were talking business, the kid wandered off to the coat-room,
where the er