They used to tell me that they didn’t have any gold-brick men over there. So they don’t. They deal in pictures—old masters, they call them. I bought two—you know the ones—those hanging in the waiting-room at the stock yards; and when I got back I found out that they had been painted by a measly little fellow who went to Paris to study art, after Bill Harris had found out that he was no good as a settling clerk. I keep ’em to remind myself that there’s no fool like an old American fool when he gets this picture paresis.
The fellow who tried to fit me out with a coat-of-arms didn’t find me so easy. I picked mine when I first went into business for myself—a charging steer—and it’s registered at Washington. It’s my trade-mark, of course, and that’s the only coat-of-arms an American merchant has any business with. It’s penetrated to every quarter of the globe in the last twenty years, and every soldier in the world has carried it—in his knapsack.
I take just as much pride in it as the fellow who inherits his and can’t find any place to put it, except on his carriage door and his letter-head—and it’s a heap more profitable. It’s got so now that every jobber in the trade knows that it stands for good quality, and that’s all any Englishman’s coat-of-arms can stand for. Of course, an American’s can’t stand for anything much—generally it’s the burned-in-the-skin brand of a snob.
After the way some of the descendants of the old New York Dutchmen with the hoe and the English general storekeepers have turned out, I sometimes feel a little uneasy about what my great-grandchildren may do, but we’ll just stick to the trade-mark and try to live up to it while the old man’s in the saddle.
I simply mention these things in a general way. I have no fears for you after you’ve been at work for a few years, and have struck an average between the packing-house and Harvard; then if you want to graze over a wider range it can’t hurt you. But for the present you will find yourself pretty busy trying to get into the winning class.
Your affectionate father,
John Graham.
No. 5
FROM John Graham, head of the house of Graham & Co., at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont Graham, at Lake Moosgatchemawamuc, in the Maine woods. Mr. Pierrepont has written to his father withdrawing his suggestion.