No. 4
FROM John Graham, head of the house of Graham & Co., at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont Graham, at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York. Mr. Pierrepont has suggested the grand tour as a proper finish to his education.
IV
June 25, 189—
Dear Pierrepont: Your letter of the seventh twists around the point a good deal like a setter pup chasing his tail. But I gather from it that you want to spend a couple of months in Europe before coming on here and getting your nose in the bull-ring. Of course, you are your own boss now and you ought to be able to judge better than any one else how much time you have to waste, but it seems to me, on general principles, that a young man of twenty-two, who is physically and mentally sound, and who hasn’t got a dollar and has never earned one, can’t be getting on somebody’s pay-roll too quick. And in this connection it is only fair to tell you that I have instructed the cashier to discontinue your allowance after July 15. That gives you two weeks for a vacation—enough to make a sick boy well, or a lazy one lazier.
I hear a good deal about men who won’t take vacations, and who kill themselves by overwork, but it’s usually worry or whiskey. It’s not what a man does during working-hours, but after them, that breaks down his health. A fellow and his business should be bosom friends in the office and sworn enemies out of it. A clear mind is one that is swept clean of business at six o’clock every night and isn’t opened up for it again until after the shutters are taken down next morning.
Some fellows leave the office at night and start out to whoop it up with the boys, and some go home to sit up with their troubles—they’re both in bad company. They’re the men who are always needing vacations, and never getting any good out of them. What every man does need once a year is a change of work—that is, if he has been curved up over a desk for fifty weeks and subsisting on birds and burgundy, he ought to take to fishing for a living and try bacon and eggs, with a little spring water, for dinner. But coming from Harvard to the packing-house will give you change enough this year to keep you in good trim, even if you didn’t have a fortnight’s leeway to run loose.
You will always find it a safe rule to take a thing just as quick as it is offered—especially a job. It is never easy to get one except when you don’t want it; but when you have to get work, and go after it with a gun, you’ll find it as shy as an old crow that every farmer in the county has had a shot at.