the best nutmegs out of pine-knots. The creatures are always going off
at a tangent into some fantastic employment, or ridiculous speculation,
entirely at variance with the "fitness of things," and having no
business whatever to be considered as a business at all. Thus you may
tell these characters immediately by the nature of their occupations. If
you ever perceive a man setting up as a merchant or a manufacturer,
or going into the cotton or tobacco trade, or any of those eccentric
pursuits; or getting to be a drygoods dealer, or soap-boiler, or
something of that kind; or pretending to be a lawyer, or a blacksmith,
or a physician--any thing out of the usual way--you may set him down at
once as a genius, and then, according to the rule-of-three, he's an ass.

Now I am not in any respect a genius, but a regular business man. My
Day-book and Ledger will evince this in a minute. They are well kept,
though I say it myself; and, in my general habits of accuracy and
punctuality, I am not to be beat by a clock. Moreover, my occupations
have been always made to chime in with the ordinary habitudes of my
fellowmen. Not that I feel the least indebted, upon this score, to my
exceedingly weak-minded parents, who, beyond doubt, would have made an
arrant genius of me at last, if my guardian angel had not come, in
good time, to the rescue. In biography the truth is every thing, and in
autobiography it is especially so--yet I scarcely hope to be believed
when I state, however solemnly, that my poor father put me, when I was
about fifteen years of age, into the counting-house of what be termed
"a respectable hardware and commission merchant doing a capital bit of
business!" A capital bit of fiddlestick! However, the consequence of
this folly was, that in two or three days, I had to be sent home to my
button-headed family in a high state of fever, and with a most violent
and dangerous pain in the sinciput, all around about my organ of order.
It was nearly a gone case with me then--just touch-and-go for six
weeks--the physicians giving me up and all that sort of thing. But,
although I suffered much, I was a thankful boy in the main. I was saved
from being a "respectable hardware and commission merchant, doing a
capital bit of business," and I felt grateful to the protuberance which
had been the means of my salvation, as well as to the kindhearted female
who had originally put these means within my reach.

The most of boys run away from h