Bill Nye's Advice
TO A YOUTH ABOUT DRUGS AND WRITING.
Mr. Bill Nye, Hudson, Wis.—Dear Sir: I hope you will pardon me for addressing you on a matter of pure business, but I have heard that you are not averse to going out of your way to do a favor now and then to those who are sincere and appreciative.
I have learned from a friend that you have been around all over the west, and so I have taken the liberty of writing you to ask what you think would be the chances of success for a young man if he were to go to Kansas to enter the drug business.
I am a practical young druggist 23 years of age and have some money—a few hundred dollars—with which to go into business. Would you advise Kansas or Colorado as a good part of the west for that business?
I have also written some for the press, but with little success. I enclose you a few slips cut from the papers in which these articles originally appeared. I send stamp for reply and hope you will answer me, even though your time may be taken up pretty well by other matters.
Respectfully yours,
Adolph Jaynes, Lock-Box 604.
Hudson, Wis., Oct. 1.—Mr. Adolph Jaynes, Lock-Box 604.—Dear Sir: Your favor of late date is at hand, and I take pleasure in writing this dictated letter to you, using the columns of the Chicago Daily News as a delicate way of reaching you. I will take the liberty of replying to your last question first, if you pardon me, and I say that you would do better, no doubt at once, in a financial way, to go on with your drug business than to monkey with literature.
In the first place, your style of composition is like the present style of dress among men. It is absolutely correct, and therefore it is absolutely like that of nine men out of every ten we meet. Your style of writing has a mustache on it, wears a three-button cutaway of some Scotch mixture, carries a cane, and wears a straight stand-up collar and scarf. It is so correct and so exactly in conformity with the prevailing style of composition, and your thoughts are expressed so thoroughly like other people's methods of dressing up their sentences and sand-papering the soul out of what they say, that I honestly think you would succeed better by trying to subsist upon the quick sales and small profits which the drug trade insures.
Now, let us consider the question of location: