ine have made them more unselfish. They will help you in many
ways. They will throw a rope to you and pull you aboard. Sooner or later
your association with them will get you position, respect, family,
happiness, success, and above all, that peace which passeth all
understanding. Do not take this as preaching. It is as practical as
anything in this book. Chesterfield says: "No man can possibly improve
in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some
degree of restraint." What makes mankind revere Shakspeare Because he
said fine things? No. But because he said true things. Listen to him:
"It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught,
as men take diseases of one another."

ON THE ROAD.

Conference maketh a ready man.--Lord Bacon.

Now stirs the lated traveler apace
To gain the timely inn.--Macbeth, Act III., Sc. 3.

What is there about going to a strange town on business
which should make a man's heart feel like a cold biscuit inside of him?
A young man may have been to a certain village on endless excursions of
pleasure, when his pulse beat as gloriously as the bass drum on a grand
circus-entry into town, yet when he has to go to the depot to take the
cars for that same town to sell goods there for the first time in his
life, it is harder to carry his heart to the train than it is to lug his
grip-sacks. When you feel that way, do not feel ashamed. All the "old
heads" on the road have been in that predicament. Talk to your heart the
way you think about a mother when she mourns for her child. You say "Let
her feel bad. It's natural. It'll do her good." Now when your home
begins to drop out of sight behind, and the conductor comes along to
punch your ticket rather than to comfort you, say to your heart "Go it,
you you old ninnyhammer! It's natural for you to thump, but you can't
interfere with business, you know!" Your mind is all right. It's your
body. Now, while

YOU ARE NEARING THAT FATAL TOWN,

you look back over the goods in the store. Of course, you are positively
familiar with everything in stock. You came out on the road either
because you asked to go, or because other folks had espied a faculty of
persuasion in you which they thought would sell goods. Sometimes a man
looks persuasively, sometimes he talks persuasively; sometimes he both
looks and talks it. This is after he has had practice. "Iron sharpeneth
iron. So a man sharpeneth the cou