ns are rarely
Napoleonic until he becomes an American. In his native dales he seldom
ventures on a daring policy. And yet his forecasting mind is always
detecting "possibeelities." So he contents himself by creeping
cautiously from point to point, ignoring big, reckless schemes and using
the safe and small, till he arrives at a florid opulence. He has
expressed his love of _festina lente_ in business in a score of
proverbs--"Bit-by-bit's the better horse, though big-by-big's the
baulder;" "Ca' canny, or ye'll cowp;" "Many a little makes a mickle;"
and "Creep before ye gang." This mingling of caution and imagination is
the cause of his stable prosperity. And its characteristic is a sure
progressiveness. That sure progressiveness was the characteristic of
Wilson's prosperity in Barbie. In him, too, imagination and caution were
equally developed. He was always foreseeing "chances" and using them,
gripping the good and rejecting the dangerous (had he not gripped the
chance of auld Rab Jamieson's barn? There was caution in that, for it
was worth the money whatever happened; and there was imagination in the
whole scheme, for he had a vision of Barbie as a populous centre and
streets of houses in his holm). And every "chance" he seized led to a
better one, till almost every "chance" in Barbie was engrossed by him
alone. This is how he went to work. Note the "bit-by-bitness" of his
great career.

When Mrs. Wilson was behind the counter, Wilson was out "distributing."
He was not always out, of course--his volume of trade at first was not
big enough for that; but in the mornings, and the long summer dusks, he
made his way to the many outlying places of which Barbie was the centre.
There, in one and the same visit, he distributed goods and collected
orders for the future. Though his bill had spoken of "carts," as if he
had several, that was only a bit of splurge on his part; his one
conveyance at the first was a stout spring cart, with a good brown cob
between the shafts. But with this he did such a trade as had never been
known in Barbie. The Provost said it was "shtupendous."

When Wilson was jogging homeward in the balmy evenings of his first
summer at Barbie, no eye had he for the large evening star, tremulous
above the woods, or for the dreaming sprays against the yellow west. It
wasn't his business; he had other things to mind. Yet Wilson was a
dreamer too. His close, musing eye, peering at the dusky-brown nodge of
his pon