rand boys were eating lunch, which was a pretty desperate
place for a boy with velvet pants on to go.

[Illustration: "_Clarence looked to me like another of his father's bad
breaks._"]

As far as we could learn from Willie when he came out of his
convulsions, the boys had been very polite to him and had insisted on
his joining in a new game which Clarence had just invented, called
playing pig-sticker. And, because he was company, Clarence told him that
he could be the pig. Willie didn't know just what being the pig meant,
but, as he told his father, it didn't sound very nice and he was afraid
he wouldn't like it. So he tried to pass along the honor to some one
else, but Clarence insisted that it was "hot stuff to be the pig," and
before Willie could rightly judge what was happening to him, one end of
a rope had been tied around his left ankle and the other end had been
passed over a transom bar, and he was dangling headforemost in the air,
while Clarence threatened his jugular with a lath sword. That was when
he let out the yell which brought his father and me on the jump and
scattered the boys all over the stock yards.

Willie's father canceled his bologna contract and marched off muttering
something about "degrading surroundings brutalizing the young;" and
Clarence's mother wrote me that I was a bad old man who had held her
husband down all his life and now wouldn't give her son a show. For,
naturally, after that little incident, I had told the boy who had been
raised a pet that he had better go back to the menagerie.

I simply mention Clarence in passing as an instance of why I am a little
slow to trust my judgment on my own. I have always found that, whenever
I thought a heap of anything I owned, there was nothing like getting the
other fellow's views expressed in figures; and the other fellow is
usually a pessimist when he's buying. The lady on the dollar is the only
woman who hasn't any sentiment in her make-up. And if you really want a
look at the solid facts of a thing you must strain off the sentiment
first.

I put you under Milligan to get a view of you through his eyes. If he
says that you are good enough to be a billing clerk, and to draw twelve
dollars a week, I guess there's no doubt about it. For he's one of
those men that never show any real enthusiasm except when they're
cussing.

Naturally, it's a great satisfaction to see a streak or two of business
ability beginning to show under the knife, b