"How much are you short?"

"Eight pounds, sir."

"Never mind; I am quite sure you have done what is right and
honourable. It is some mistake; and you won't let it happen again.
Take this and make your account straight."

'The young man takes the proffered paper. He sees an order for ten
pounds; and retires as full of admiration as he had approached full of
anxiety.

"Now, what is the next thing?" This time a porter is summoned. He
comes forward as if he expected rebuke. "Oh! I have got such a
complaint reported against you. You know that will never do. You must
not let that occur again."

'Thus, with incredible dispatch, matter after matter is settled, and
all who leave that office go to their work as if some one had oiled
all their joints.

'At another time, you find the master passing through the warehouse.
Here, his quick glance descries a man who is moving drowsily, and he
says a sharp word that makes him, in a moment, nimble. There, he sees
another blundering at his work. He had no idea that the master's eye
was upon him, till he finds himself suddenly supplanted at the job. In
a trice, it is done; and his master leaves him to digest the
stimulant. Now, a man comes up to tell him of some plan he has in his
mind, for improving something in his own department of the business.
"Yes, thank you, that's a good idea;" and putting half-a-crown into
his hand, he passes on. In another place he finds a man idling. You
can soon see, that of all spectacles this is the one least to his
mind. "If you waste five minutes, that is not much; but probably if
you waste five minutes yourself, you lead some one else to waste five
minutes, and that makes ten. If a third follow your example, that
makes a quarter of an hour. Now, there are about a hundred and eighty
of us here; and if every one wasted five minutes in a day, what would
it come to? Let me see. Why, it would be fifteen hours; and fifteen
hours a day would be ninety hours--about eight days, working-time, in
a week; and in a year, would be four hundred days. Do you think we
could ever stand waste like that?" The poor loiterer is utterly
confounded. He had no idea of eating up fifteen hours, much less four
hundred days, of his good employer's time; and he never saw before how
fast five minutes could be multiplied.'

Mr Budgett was the son of a worthy couple, not exactly in poor, but in
rather difficult circumstances. He had little school education; but
his mother ga