Letters from a Son to His Self-Made Father / Being the Replies to Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

by Charles Eustace Merriman

"Well, if I make one sale a year, I think I'm doing pretty well."

"Von sale a year!" exclaimed the descendant of Aaron, with a pitying smile. "Von sale a year! Vy, vot do you travel for?"

"Suspension bridges," replied the quiet man, and we all regarded our cigar ashes in silence. After a while we suspended the Hebrew from the association for not making good at the bar.

One of the crowd is a Boston fellow who is out selling encyclopedias. He has the usual Hub classicism, aided and abetted by a desire to ask conundrums. He hit everybody good and hard, and then landed on me.

"Why are you so different from Circe?" he asked.

Of course I gave it up. Does anybody ever guess conundrums they don't know?

"Because Circe turned men into hogs, while you are trying to turn hogs into men," he replied, and I started for bed then and there. Always on the hog, always! When will it end?

This town is full and boiling over with drummers. I never saw so many in one day in my life. There is more shop talk going on here to-night than occurs in a week in all the Siegel-Cooper stores. I verily believe that there are ten men here to try and sell something, for every man there is to buy. Somehow or other the town has assumed the proportions of a junction, or a drummers' fair. The townspeople, they say, are much excited over it, and the village constable is at the town hall swearing in two deputies. As Job Withers has made himself very conspicuous during the day, I think the reason for the reign of terror is evident.

Job, by the way, had a bit of the conceit taken out of him at the depot this evening. Several of us were down there to inquire about trains, etc. As no train would stop for nearly an hour, none of the station hands were about. Withers took the fact as a text and delivered a short, but exceedingly ornate, sermon to the crossing flagman on the moribund condition of the town. He fairly tore its reputation to shreds. Finally, with one finger laying down the law in the palm of his other hand, Job fired this at the defenceless old flagman: