THUS THE GENTLEMAN GETS AN IDEA

of his utter incompetency to fill the place of a trained man.  And he never gets half so complete a view of his uselessness as do those around him.  Such proof-readers rarely work two nights.  They are corporals in captains’ places.  Or, perhaps, they are captains of artillery in the infantry service.  What do folks do when the best proof-reader is missing?  They go out into the type-setting room and take the brightest printer they can find.  He cannot tell French from Latin, but he can see a fair share of the errors in a proof-slip, and will not let the telegraphic abbreviation for government go into the paper as “goat,” nor that for Republican as “roofer,” as I have seen collegiates do.

HE IS ALREADY A LIEUTENANT.

Give him a little practice and he is a captain.  With energy and ambition failure never comes if you only know the difficulties.  “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” is as good in business as in poetry.  In the great cities there are long streets lined with retail store-rooms of every quality of location.  They rent at from twenty-five to a hundred dollars a month.  Many a store-room has not had an occupant in it for ten years who did not grow poorer.  No good business man could be induced to enter into a business at such a point.  But

THE FOOLS HAVE RUSHED IN,

like the collegiate into the proof-room, convinced that they could do what good business men know to be impossible,—­that is take in eight dollars a day and pay fifty dollars rent, on forty per cent profit.  Here and there is a grocer who gets up at half past five in the morning, opens up, puts out his eggs, oranges, berries, lemons, potatoes, beans, and bananas, sweeps out, gets out his horse, goes to the market-street, does a day’s buying there and elsewhere, and by eight o’clock is ready for business, just about as the man who expects to share in trade with him is unlocking his doors.  Speak to the eight o’clock man and he will tell you that he has to stay up till ten at night, and that he cannot burn the candle of life at both ends.  But, for all that, he is grievously disappointed when the final collapse comes.  Nothing succeeds like success because very few things are like success.  Nothing on the street succeeds like this grocery, because nowhere else on the street is so much work done by so few men.  Nowhere else does the proprietor put all of his time and his money into his business, and, in strawberry time, for instance, retail thirty-five dollars’ worth of strawberries in one day with only one clerk, one delivery-boy and a cashier!  At the same time, this successful grocer would not invest one cent in the store-room opposite, where, with so much confidence, the eight-o’clock man has put all his money.

THE MAN OF SUCCESS KNOWS THE DIFFICULTIES.