The Golden Censer Part 9

SUCH A SPARTAN SPIRIT WEEDS OUT

most of the ordinary blunders of business. Now if this great rich banker could not afford to indulge in mistakes, how much less can you, who have your whole fortune to make, be anything less than strictly accurate in all your operations? Study the spirit of that banker's answer. Imitate his horror of an error. He must have had good reasons for that feeling.

A HOMELY EXAMPLE.

A customer comes in from the country. He says: "I have brought a load of wheat to town to-day--about fifty bushel I should guess. I'll be in after noon and settle my account with you." Very good; you, the clerk, hurry to your books, to make out his account. When he comes in, he glances over it, and says: "Good gracious! you haven't given me credit for four dollars and seventy-five cents I paid you last May. I recollect it because I was in town to get a corn-planter when I paid it.

And I've got your receipt, too." Sure enough, there is the receipt, which you have filled out yourself. And yet you failed to make an entry of the fact in his account. Shame covers you.

THE FARMER BEGINS TO HAVE SUSPICIONS.

Your employer begins to talk of the fall plowing as soon as he can, but the farmer goes over to your unscrupulous compet.i.tors in business, relates to them the fact that his scrupulous attention to details has saved him four dollars and seventy-five cents, and asks their opinion as to whether or not an attempt were not made to cheat him. His listeners talk about you in a mild-mannered way--

d.a.m.n with faint praise, a.s.sent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer.

Off goes your customer in his lumber-wagon, carrying that gross libel upon your place of business, to fill the prairies and the openings with its brood of gossiped offspring, until, some day, it comes back that your employer is a horsethief and has served a term in the penitentiary!

The errors which are often made in handling figures are just as annoying. It is a trifling error to call eight and four thirteen, but it often may disconcert an immense calculation. Like the pebble in the shoe, small in itself, it may do great injury. Some years ago there traveled through the country a genuine "lightning calculator." You could put down any number, big or little, while his back was turned, and he would turn again and mark the total with far greater rapidity than he could speak, and he thought out the total far quicker than he could mark it. Of course, he had a magic book to sell, but when you came to read his magic book and see how he did it, you found it was the same old way, only he was more expert than you. He could add four thousand two hundred and twenty eight and three thousand six hundred and fifty four as easily as you could forty two and thirty six, or perhaps four and three, so you see that the scheme of running up a single column of figures is at best a clumsy one.

YOU EXPOSE YOURSELF

to additional errors by enlarging the possible additions in a body of numbers. We are taught the multiplication table up to twelve times twelve. We never stumble up to that point. But it ought to continue up to one hundred times one hundred. We could then always add two figures to two figures easier then to parcel the operation out into two jobs.

The "lightning calculator" had probably carried it up to five thousand times five thousand. Take an interest in "sums." Learn

THE FREAKS OF FIGURES.

For instance, to multiply any set of figures by 11--say 54--add the 5 and 4 together and put the 9 between the 5 and the 4. To multiply 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 by 11, do the same way, only carry your 10's. Thus 6 and 5 are 11, put down 1 before the 6; 5 and 4 are 9 and 1 to carry is 10; put down the before the 16, etc. Again to multiply, say 18 9's by 9, bring down a 1, then make 170's and a 9 out to the left. Again to square numbers, call even 10's the body; call the rest the surplus,--104--add surplus to body making it 108; now square the surplus (4) making 16 and put it after the 108, or 10,816. This is simply taking advantage of the 10s. Take 33 and you will see. Here 3 is the surplus; add the surplus, making 36; multiply 36 by 30, making 1,080; square the surplus, 3 times 3--9; add to 1,080--making 1,089. You see you get an even thirty to multiply by and load up the sum to be multiplied sufficiently to balance. Above 5 call it a deficit and go to your next 10 for your body.

I MENTION THESE TRICKS

not because they are good for anything practical, but to get you to take up figures and be quick with them. Get yourself up a multiplication table running to 50 times 50--there's something practical. The man quick and accurate at figures is always esteemed.

OUR LANGUAGE

is a vast record of the changes in p.r.o.nunciation which have been brought about by affected people as well as careless and ignorant people. "'Tis true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true." But you cannot change it by spelling "balance" with two _ls_, or "sure" with an _h_. Be accurate in your spelling. Restrict yourself to such words as you can spell, and you will soon improve if you are guilty of such errors. In conclusion, if you go fishing and catch three perch and one black ba.s.s, say that you caught those fish, and not that you caught three black ba.s.s and one perch. Right there is where you can form habits that will shine out in your face as you grow to the full dignity of manhood. You see I lay special stress on habit. The Duke of Wellington said that habit was ten times nature. Horace Mann said

"HABIT IS A CABLE.

We weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it." Dr.

Locke said with a wonderful knowledge of life: "Habit works more constantly and with greater facility than reason; which, when we have most need of it, is seldom fairly consulted, and more rarely obeyed."

Thus, you see, when a man is spoken of as a person "of good habits," it means something more than is usually conceived. It means he is under chains which he cannot break--and, in reality, that he could not be a bad man without suffering and discomfort.

SUCCESS.

Nothing succeeds so well as success.--Talleyrand.

[Ill.u.s.tration T] The man Talleyrand, who made the above mocking a.s.sertion, was one of the closest observers of human nature who have ever lived. And yet what he said in a spirit of uncommon hatred of his fellow-beings is really another way of saying the exact truth--that success comes only after so many trials and disappointments that the world, considering it a safe rule, admires the result, and feels that the reflected credit for a great result belongs to him upon whom it falls. Beside you toils a young man of your own age. He does not seem to care to rise. He dislikes the few duties of the present, and would be inclined to shrink from further responsibilities. It may be that he is the happier as compared with you, but men must not consult simply their own individual happiness. Sooner or later all men take on a broader burden than merely their own support. Try early in life to get the start which the experience of others furnishes you. You are lucky that you were born in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Men before you have, by ambition and energy, made the affair of living easier for you.

Right here in youth is the time to begin the battle. You are now a private.

OFFICERS ARE VERY SCARCE.

Make up your mind to have shoulder-straps early in the campaign. You cannot afford to miss a single battle. Every opportunity which opens to you is a city to be taken, and you are to be put in command. See that it surrenders. No city ever properly besieged evaded final capitulation.

The chances are all in your favor. Remember, when you contemplate your unambitious comrade, that he is likely to change his tastes as he grows older. If he cannot give a reasonable degree of encouragement to those tastes he will then become crabbed and sour. Wherever you see men crusty and difficult to please, be sure they have had cities to take and failed to capture them.

ALEXANDER SMITH,

a Scotch poet who died at a very early age, said very appropriately: "To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required--just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and strawberries." Now how are you to catch this marvelous sunshine of prosperity? Simply, do not shut it out. Your comrade has had the moral ague. He fears that, if the sun shine on him, it will bring a return of his fever. When the sun shines on you, do not miss a ray. It makes you grow.

YOUR PARTICULAR DUTIES

are soon learned. Why is it that the affairs of walking behind a counter and actually knowing what your employer pays for his goods so soon lose the magic there once was in them? It is because the human brain is supple, and comprehends quickly. By the time certain problems are solved others spring up. See that you solve them. The mind should be pacified in its desire for new conquests.

THE SAFE RULE

as to whether or not you are fitted for new endeavors is to find to your own true satisfaction that you can do your duties better than anyone not in daily practice of the same kind of work. If your employer can take hold and do a thing once a week better than you who do it a hundred times a day, then it should still have considerable charm for you, for your mind is strangely unfamiliar with the procedure. When a clerk stays in one position all his life, it is certain to be from

LACK OF BOTH AMBITION AND ABILITY,

and he lacks a good deal of each. Every little while, through the sickness, advancement, or bad judgment of others, a place just a little more responsible than your own is left vacant. Somebody is wanted badly.

You are the man, and are put there for the interval. There is the pivotal point. By unusual endeavor you can probably fill the place better than it was filled by the regular occupant. Your employer, expecting less of you, gets more, and praises you. Now, by praising you, he is, somehow or other,

"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 amba.s.sador.

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

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