and I got the credit. Ever hear how Hopkins came to make me sales manager?" Jenkins shook his head. "He had put me on as a salesman," Dean explained. "My first trip, a big prospect hunted me up, said he'd decided to trade with us, and gave me a whooping order. My predecessor had worked on them four years; they fell into my lap, and Hopkins thought I was a worker of miracles from that day."

Jenkins shook his head, smiling. "You give yourself the worst of it," he commented.

Dean's eyes had become sober and thoughtful; he spoke slowly, as though invoking memory. "You've called me a self-made man. But, as a matter of fact, it was the mere accident that I was on the spot which gave me that first order; and that order made me sales manager within two months' time. By and by the automobile came along, and Old Jasper remodeled his factory and went after the businesswith me in charge. He gave me some stock; and a year or two later his son Charlie died and took the heart out of the old man. He offered to sell out to me, and I gave him a bundle of notes for the whole thing. The business paid them off inside of five years. Do you see? The fact that I was salesman made me sales manager; the fact that I was sales manager made me vice president; the fact that I was vice president threw the business into my hands; and the fact that everybody wanted to buy cars has done the rest. Still call me a selfmade man?"

"After all," Jenkins suggested, "you had made good or you wouldn't have been given the job as salesman."

Dean nodded emphatically. "That's the key to the whole structure," he agreed. "That first job as salesman. And that's what I want to tell you about. If you care to

hear."

The reporter did care to hear, and this-as he shaped the tale in his thoughts thereafter-is what he heard:

Hi

TOMER DEAN and Will Matthews grew up in adjoining back yards, fought and bled with and for each other as boys will, went

through high school side by side, took a business course given by a broken-down bookkeeper in a bare room over the Thornton Drug Store, and went to work in the offices of the Hopkins Tool Company within a month of each other as vacancies occurred there. Will got the first job, Homer the second. They helped with labels in the shipping room, kept checking lists, and eventually graduated to keeping books.

The tool company was a one-man concern. Old Jasper Hopkins had founded it, and intended to turn it over to his boy Charlie when his own time should be done. Old Jasper-he was then no more than in his late forties, but he was Old Jasper just the same was a man of many eccentricities. He had begun as a mechanic, a machinist; and he had mastered the machinery of the shop, but never mastered the machinery of business. He picked machinists for his shop work, but for the white-collar jobs he chose men with no grime under their finger nails. Who sought a job with him began in the shipping room, and advanced-if he had merit-through regular and accustomed channels. Keeping books was the second rung of the ladder. Jasper could not multiply eight by seven; he had a vast respect for any man who could.

Will Matthews could, and so could Homer Dean. Also they recommended themselves to Jasper in other ways. The head of the Hopkins Tool Company had breathed the dust from his own emery wheels in the past; he was of a gritty and abrading disposition. His nerves were tight, his temper was loose; and to arouse him meant an explosion that resembled noth

summarily discharged Jim Porter for carelessly rumpling the corner of the office rug. Noise he hated, neatness and order he demanded and revered; and more than one office boy had lost his job for scanting his daily task of putting a fresh and spotless blotter on the broad pad upon Old Jasper's desk.

These likes and dislikes Homer and Will respected; to a legitimate extent they catered to them; and thus they attained a certain eminence in their employer's eyes. He had been known to refer to them as promising young men. They knew this as well as others did, and there was a good-natured rivalry between them to see which should distance the other on the upward way.

HIS was not the only rivalry between the two

young men. Her name was Annie Cool, and she was some four years younger than either. They became aware of her the year after her graduation from high school, when she let down her skirts and put up her prettily luxuriant hair and ceased to be "that Cool kid" in their eyes. There is a wide gulf between twelve and sixteen; there is even a gulf between sixteen and twenty. But when the signs are right, there is no gulf at all between, say, eighteen and twenty-two.

Annie was eighteen and they were twenty-two. Presently she was nineteen and they were twenty-three, and a little after that she was twenty and they were twentyfour.

By this time each of the young men was conscious of much more than a pleasantly intense delight in Annie Cool's companionship. Will Matthews was always somewhat more mature than Homer Dean; he took Annie more seriously. He wooed her gently, with kindliness and much persistence; and Homer wooed her laughingly, with raillery and the rough teasing that goes with youth. There were times when she liked to be with Will; there were other times when she liked to be with Homer, but most of the time she liked to be with both of them, and said so. Other young men of the community knew the uselessness of intrusion on their intimacy.

It had not come to the point of marriage talk, for Will and Homer were getting only a matter of fifteen dollars weekly wage, and even in those days fifteen dollars a week was not considered a competence. But Jasper never paid his bookkeepers more. A salesman, now, was another matter; beside those of a bookkeeper, his wages were munificent. Enough, that is to say, for marrying.

In the fall of the year, when they were twenty-four and Annie Cool was twenty, Steve Randall was killed in a train wreck. Steve was a salesman in the southern territory, and Old Jasper was accustomed to fill vacancies in his selling force from the men who worked upon his books. Both Will and Homer were in line for the job. For three days, till after Steve's funeral, everyone ignorel this fact; then a certain atmosphere of expectancy began to develop in the office. Old Jasper was in bed at home with a shaking cold, but on the fourth day word came that next morning would see him at the office. Everyone knew his choice would be either Homer or Will.

ing so much as the commotion which results when the mainspring of an ancient alarm clock in process of dissection is injudiciously set free.

His prejudices were tradition. While Will and Homer were still in the shipping room they heard how he had scorched Charlie Dunn with many words over the mere slamming of a door. And how he had reduced Luther Worthing from salesman to bookkeeper again because Luther faced him one morning with waistcoat half unbuttoned. And how he had

On their way home together after work that day these two met Charlie Hopkins, the old man's son; and Charlie stopped, smiling like a bearer of good news. "I've just come from father," he told them and he added:

(Continued on page 26)

If you were a small boy adopted out of a children's home in Des Moines, and if you went to live with a close-fisted Yankee farmer like Zeke Preston in this story, then you might be glad if even a stray dog came your way. A boy and a dog are an unbeatable combination, and Miss Brown weaves them into a story of convincing humanness

S

TEPHEN DOUGLAS

had been placed out. One day in early March, Hephzibah Preston vis

ited the Home for Orphans in Des Moines, and she chose Stephen, perhaps because he had a quaint little twist to his smile, or because she saw, or thought she did, a wistful look in his solemn gray eyes, or perhaps because his middle name was Hezekiah. Hephzibah Preston came from New England too, and she believed that all the fundamental virtues originated east of the Mississippi. Not, of course, that the boy's middle name was any proof of his origin, but it pointed that way.

At any rate, Mrs. Preston signed a great many papers, and assured an efficient and starchy matron that she and her husband would take care of the boy and see that he finished the grades. Stephen's traveling outfit, including all

his belongings, was packed in the photogravure section of a Chicago Sunday paper, and Stephen and his new protector departed on the 12.13 for Green Mountain, Iowa.

On the train the boy sat next to the window, but his eyes were fixed upon a perambulating cockroach that traversed the red plush of the seat opposite them. A curious, numb embarrassment seized upon Hephzibah Preston. She wanted to say something to this little chap, whom yesterday she never had heard of and for whom to-day she was irrevocably responsible. Perhaps if she had been born west of the Mississippi she might have tousled his hair and bought him a box of indigestible honey-coated pop corn which a nasal-voiced newsboy was shouting through the train.

"This town we're stoppin' at is New Castle and the next one is Roaring Brook, and then Green Mountain," she said at last. "We get off there."

Still the boy's eyes did not leave the jet glossy back of the cockroach. The news vender, on his return through the train, thrust a yellow-and-black checkered box of lemon drops into her hands. "Five cents, a nickel, a half a dime," he bawled.

Hephzibah Preston bought it. "Here, Hezekiah,"

she said.

But

"Nobody never calls me that," he protested. he smiled his queer little twisted smile at her and held the box, unopened, clasped tightly in his hands.

A hot rush of tenderness surged through her, and something like a sob caught in her throat. Zeke would be mad, she knew. Zeke wanted somebody big enough to be a hand. The thrifty theory that it was cheaper to adopt than to hire was the motive back of his slowly matured purpose to take a boy. Hephzibah consoled herself with the thought that there hadn't been many big boys to choose from,

anyway, and this one would grow. Just the same, as the jogging day coach approached Green Mountain, the size of Stephen Hezekiah began to shrink and her apprehensions to increase.

It was a gray day, heavy with the portent of more rain, and the roads, were still logy from the late thaw. Zeke had driven the plowhorse to the spring wagon, and it was standing now outside the dreary station, where many another plowhorse had pawed restless hollows in the soft earth while his master gossiped with Trim Hiatt in the waiting room. Zeke Preston wasn't the sort who gossiped. People didn't like Zeke, and he didn't like people. Into the easy-going, generous, loose-fisted Middle West he had brought the grim inheritance of a long line of Vermont farmers, men whose lives never lifted more than one notch above the narrow horizon of poverty. Against those rocky, unrequiting hillsides they had rubbed out their existences, like steel against a whetstone. When the little colony of New England pioneers had gone West, Zeke followed, but he had never caught up with them. Though they brought to a mountainless, creekless prairie the old Vermont names of Green Mountain and Roaring Brook, they left much behind.

IN

N Iowa one farmed in a big way, loosely, extravagantly, successfully. It was a young soil, wantonly fertile and responsive. Men staked out big farms and helped one another in the harvest season. Zeke Preston asked no help-nor did he give any. Iowa farming seemed to him wasteful and a sin. Not possessing the gift of expression, he was understood by nobody. Nobody tried to understand him.

"Zeke Preston's as close as Sunday to Monday," opined Trim Hiatt.

But Trim Hiatt was no great psychologist. If

Zeke Preston seemed parsimonious, his parsimony arose not from motives of greed. Every foot of that stubborn New England farm had been tilled as a French peasant tills his garden. The struggle to live had grooved something deeper into his consciousness than mere thrift. He owed something to his land, just as it owed something to him. If he had called that something a name, it might have been loyalty, but the Prestons had no gift for speech. The slapdash, careless methods of any pioneer people seemed sacrilege to him. "They cheat the land," he protested.

Perhaps they did, but it appeared each season an inexhaustible treasury.

When Green Mountain heard that Zeke Preston and his New England wife, who kept house with the same shortsighted thrift with which Zeke farmed, were going to take a boy, there was much speculation and not a little concern in the village.

"I suppose old Zeke'll give him one square meal a day and an orange on Christmas," remarked Trim Hiatt.

There were those who distrusted even this abundance.

"It's a durn fool thing for them to do," announced Dade Fellows.

Zeke, as he walked up and down the platform, his coonskin collar hugged up tightly against a raw March wind, thought so too. When he saw his wife and the thin-legged, gray-eyed urchin at her side he knew so.

"Zeke, this is Hezekiah," she said. She could not know the pleading that burned in her eyes. Zeke stared and grunted. "Well?" she said.

"He seems awful little," the man answered. "Git into the wagon."

Wedged in between the two, the boy from the

Home for Orphans watched the reins flop up and. down on the broad back of old Ringer. He wondered why it was they never quite flopped off. Then he wondered why it seemed to hurt so much just to swallow, and why his eyes smarted. He hugged the little box of lemon drops so hard his fingers ached and grew white.

"Won't be good for much but pullin' mornin'-glory weeds," the man was saying. Hephzibah Preston never talked back. It was wiser not to.

For supper that night they had codfish balls and mince pie. The codfish came in a wooden box, and it always molded a little before they could finish it; but then one had always had codfish for supper in Vermont. The milk, which, Stephen discovered, would some way slip down, contained more yellow cream than Zeke Preston, by the light of the one kerosene lamp, could ascertain. Considerably more than he would have deemed necessary.

After supper Stephen helped redd up the kitchen. At the home he had done dishes whenever his turn came around, and he had never been considered unhandy, but to-night, either because he was very tired, or just too miserable to care, Zeke's mustache cup, that had come all the way from Bennington, squirmed somehow from under his soapy fingers and went

""Leven," the boy stumbled, ""leven." This time his voice came stronger. Looking up suddenly, he caught the eye of the man towering above him. "'Leven, goin' on twelve"-he was fairly screaming now "you big bully!"

Zeke Preston caught the boy's arm and twisted it back sharply. Hephzibah did not look up. Though the fragments dropped again from her fingers, this time it was she who could not see to reassemble them.

Late that night she crept upstairs to the gable room where Stephen slept. It was cold there, but she stood a long time. Finally the boy stirred, and in the moonlight she could see his eyes open. Hephzibah knew she must say something.

"Here's your box of lemon drops," she finally stammered. "You must ha' left them when you went to bed, Hezekiah."

For a long moment he did not answer, then he stretched out his hand from the bedclothes. "Nobody never calls me that," he protested. But he smiled at her.

Held tight against him, the sharp-edged little box seemed strangely comforting. Comforting too was the memory Hephzibah bore away of that twisted, soon-gone smile.

S a farming asset, Zeke Preston's estimate of

been struggling in his throat for an hour had not escaped then the accident would not have become a tragedy. But Zeke hated a cry-baby.

"How old d'you say he was, this boy?" the man thundered.

Stephen jumped as though he had been struck. For a brief instant he tried to meet the man's eyes, but it was a failure. On his knees, his eyes blinded now with tears, he tried to pick up the rough pieces. Kneeling beside him was Hephzibah. Their hands touched in a futile effort to reassemble the treasure. "How old d'you say he was?" Zeke repeated. He had risen now and was standing, feet wide apart, glaring down at them.

to err. Stephen was distinctly a failure. Even Zeke, who spared neither himself nor anyone else, was forced to admit there were some things too heavy for the boy to lift. As a puller of weeds, too, he left much to be desired. Even a kindly disposed employer would have to be excused a show of irritation when beans and peas and early sweet corn plants were removed in the same thorough manner as iron weed and elephant ear and wild clover. Stephen Hezekiah's idea of weeding a garden was to extract from it all growing plant life.

Besides, Stephen always found delightful things to play with. Grotesquely long, plump angleworms,

hop-toads, ground thrush nests, and the sluggish water in the quarter-section ditch offered infinite possibilities in the way of crawdads and tadpoles. Had his own wishes been consulted, he would have preferred a dog or even a kitten to this entire galaxy of amphibians, but dogs and cats had to be fed extra and were consequently taboo. In the house Hephzibah insisted the boy was a great help. Perhaps he was, but Zeke remained skeptical. Anyway, as he growled, he hadn't intended to adopt a hired girl.

Often Stephen Hezekiah's motives were unquestionably of the best. He would have every intention to pile the firewood neatly in the lean-to back of the kitchen, to empty the ashes in the Franklin burner, to search the haymow for the eggs of itinerant hens, and to finish hoeing the squash patch. But a field mouse, he discovered, had taken up her abode in the woodpile. How could one pile on more sticks until one had first searched out the field mouse's apartment? There might be baby field mice!

Almost without fail, too, Zeke Preston would appear at the moment wher. some undertaking thoroughly unconnected with work was under way. To the boy Zeke was like an ogre conjured up out of the darkness of an unfriendly world. To Zeke Stephen represented the flowering of that shiftlessness and disloyalty he abhorred in his neighbors, but which in them he was powerless to eradicate. What a sensible man would have been exasperated with, but would have forgiven, Zeke held to be a moral rottenness. Unless the boy was chastened he would grow up a waster and a scoundrel. Zeke held himself to be the divinely appointed chastener.

WITH the strong fall rains a tragedy took place

up on Section Four. The wire fence along the quarter-section ditch was washed away and a cow stumbled into the muddy torrent and was drowned. The loss of the cow was a catastrophe almost irreparable. Besides, with the husking and the fall plowing Zeke had no time for mending fences.

A long inspection of the matter, too, convinced him new poles and wire were required, and that would mean a special trip to town, a day lost on the farm, and an outlay of maybe fifteen dollars. Zeke juggled it this way and that in his mind, and furrows of anxiety deepened between his shaggy brows. Then he remembered the boy. Stephen should drive the cows to pasture each morning and stay with them till milking time. By the broken fence he should take up his sentinel and with a long stick drive them back whenever an adventurous urge toward new fields of clover should overcome them.

All the way to the pasture that first day Zeke impressed the boy with the seriousness of his mission. Had the Prestons been born with the gift of speech, Zeke's words would have burned. Here was Stephen's chance to prove that even in the heart of boys who have been placed out exists a spark of loyalty; here was his opportunity to redeem the sins of his heedless past. But all Zeke could say was: "Ye must be mindful of the critters, boy," and "None of that laggin', boy; step along."

Stephen Hezekiah had every good reason in the world for lagging. He was cold already, for the raw chill of early winter tinged the air, and the fields, seared brown and withered, held none of the resources He or witchery of summer. would be in luck to find more than a half dozen crickets and a stiff-legged, freezing grasshopper to beguile his solitude.

But Stephen's chief reason for lagging was none of these. It was a reason Zeke would never tolerate a miserable, cowardly reason. Stephen was afraid (Continued on page 20)

I

HAVE been making farm implements for sixty

five years in York, Pa. These sixty-five years have carried me through nearly every important financial and political crisis of the country; I have seen the country grow from a large and somewhat clumsy child into a powerful, lightly treading man. If, as Collier's has just said, this is a time to consult experienced men, I believe I may qualify in length of service. During my business lifetime I have never seen a period:

(1) When the country, in the opinion of competent observers, was not going to the dogs.

(2) When the farmer was satisfied with the prices that he was getting for his product or said that he was making money.

(3) When the manufacturer and merchant were not complaining that what was needed was a change in the Administration and a chance to let prosperity blossom.

(4) When the man who put all his brains and energy into his affairs did not make money according to the amount of brains and energy he had to put in.

(5) When the workmen as a whole got less money than their work was worth or when the good workman did not prosper and the lazy workman try some method other than work to get a living.

(6) When those who were happy and prospering did not make less noise than those who were unhappy and failing.

(7) When, excepting during the last two years, a man could make a good living using less than a normal amount of brains.

(8) When any resourceful and honest man, not a speculator, could not make his own business conditions.

Now I am not going to tell how much better we used to arrange things in the good old days. did not arrange them a small fraction as well

We

By A. B. Farquhar

Illustrated by H. L. Grout

The man who wrote this article owns and actively manages a factory in Pennsylvania. Its people were within earshot of the heavy guns at Gettysburg. After the battle Mr. Farquhar went to see President Lincoln, and learned something which he used ever ince, and which he now passes along. Among the things which Mr. Farquhar says here are two paragraphs which ought to be pasted on the desk of every doubting man in America:

"The wise man knows that business is no

parlor game. He does not follow the crowd. He maps his own course and does not bother much about conditions.' He makes his own conditions."

"Hamilton Fish told me that the way to have credit is to keep all promises exactly. If you do that,' he said, 'for all people know, you may be worth a billion dollars."

as we do to-day. We had not the things to do with. If you can imagine yourself in a very undeveloped country with only a few railways, and those slow, dirty, and most uncomfortable, without good

roads, automobiles, telephones, typewriters, or electric lights, you will easily realize that two or three hours of effort are now as productive as a day was then.

When I first started in business on my own account just before the Civil War I had my house and my shop right together, and although I worked regularly from six in the morning until ten or eleven at night and had the abundant strength and energy of youth, yet my biggest day's work did not then amount to as much in actual accomplishment as a couple of hours to-day.

THE

Brains Still Needed

HE amusing part is that to-day, because it is really so easy to get things done, we are developing a notion that things ought to look after themselves and that, because a small amount of work will bring a living, we ought to be able to get along without any work at all.

We do not have to do so much work for ourselves to-day. Neither worker nor employer has to use his hands as much, but it is a blessed provision of nature that we still must use our heads and perhaps we must use them a little harder.

With so much ease and comfort and convenience about us, I cannot get myself worked up, or even more than mildly interested in the recurrent reports that business is bad or business is good. I have so often received invitations for a general mourning over the economic death of the countryand I have so often made plans to attend the services, only to be told, when I had my sackcloth all ready and was looking around for the ashes, that the facts of the death had been exaggerated and that the patient had spoiled all of the funeral plans by going out shooting-that nowadays I chuck all of these invitations into the wastebasket and do not

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