week better than you who do it a hundred
times a day, then it should still have considerable charm for you, for
your mind is strangely unfamiliar with the procedure. When a clerk stays
in one position all his life, it is certain to be from

LACK OF BOTH AMBITION AND ABILITY,

and he lacks a good deal of each. Every little while, through the
sickness, advancement, or bad judgment of others, a place just a little
more responsible than your own is left vacant. Somebody is wanted badly.
You are the man, and are put there for the interval. There is the
pivotal point. By unusual endeavor you can probably fill the place
better than it was filled by the regular occupant. Your employer,
expecting less of you, gets more, and praises you. Now, by praising
you, he is, somehow or other,

"TAKING STOCK IN YOU."

If he "keeps you down," he shows his poor judgment, and he is not going
to do that if he can help it. On the other hand, your comrade is put in
the vacant place. The duties are hard and perplexing. He is compelled to
go and ask a man for some money. The man is mean. He not only refuses
the money, but addresses some personal considerations to your comrade
which sicken him to the heart. He returns to your employer with a tale
of failure well tinged with his own morbid feelings and wounded vanity.
Your employer is irritated, and attributes the fiasco to the ambassador.
To satisfy his own views of things, he prophesies that your comrade
never will amount to anything, anyhow. Now, to see this prediction
verified is, unfortunately for your comrade, just as necessary to your
employer's self-love as to see you succeed. The point of the first
opportunity, the first impression on your employer, is really central,
pivotal. If you get a big iron safe on such a spot, you can turn it with
extraordinary ease.

There is no road to practical business so good as practice. You read of
clerks being educated by sham forms of business. You might as well read
of men gambling with counterfeit money. Business men want clerks who
have been private, corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, captain. When a man
starts in as captain he is likely to get discharged as private. In the
great printing houses

PROOF READERS

are required, to see that the types are spelled out, one by one, into
the right words, and that the right words are rightly spelled. Now let a
college graduate apply for such a position. He knows Greek and Latin. He
can spell--or thin