“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 thinks he can.  He can turn you out a sentence, which, after going about so far, refers to what it is talking about, cuts a pigeon-wing like the boys on the ice, tells a little tale between two dashes, and one inside of that between two parentheses ("finger-nails,” the printers call them), again refers to what it is talking about, and closes up with three unaccented syllables following a heavy sound.  Sometimes folks hire this gentleman.  The proof-slip is thrown in wet, greatly to his horror, and after drying it he finds they are waiting for it outside, and some other proof-reader is compelled to take it.  Then he learns he must read it wet, as it is.  Pretty soon the foreman of the printers brings in a proof-slip which is set in three sizes of type where the gentleman discovered but one size.  Then the foreman of the proof-room has a discouraging way of taking the gentleman’s proof and marking from eight to ten glaring typographical errors which the gentleman has overlooked, and eight or ten typographical absurdities, which he has approved, and, horrors upon horrors! eight or ten errors of “style.”  Now, for the first time, the gentleman has learned that every time the word “President” appears in the newspaper it is either capitalized or uncapitalized, while he had naturally supposed that it took its chances, the way a picnic does!