Private Car Parnassus, Aug. 15, 189—
Dear Pierrepont: Perhaps it’s just as well that I had to hurry last night to make my train, and so had no time to tell you some things that are laying mighty heavy on my mind this morning.
Jim Donnelly, of the Donnelly Provision Company, came into the office in the afternoon, with a fool grin on his fat face, to tell me that while he appreciated a note which he had just received in one of the firm’s envelopes, beginning “Dearest,” and containing an invitation to the theatre to-morrow night, it didn’t seem to have any real bearing on his claim for shortage on the last carload of sweet pickled hams he had bought from us.
Of course, I sent for Milligan and went for him pretty rough for having a mailing clerk so no-account as to be writing personal letters in office hours, and such a blunderer as to mix them up with the firm’s correspondence. Milligan just stood there like a dumb Irishman and let me get through and go back and cuss him out all over again, with some trimmings that I had forgotten the first time, before he told me that you were the fellow who had made the bull. Naturally, I felt pretty foolish, and, while I tried to pass it off with something about your still being green and raw, the ice was mighty thin, and you had the old man running tiddledies.
It didn’t make me feel any sweeter about the matter to hear that when Milligan went for you, and asked what you supposed Donnelly would think of that sort of business, you told him to “consider the feelings of the girl who got our brutal refusal to allow a claim for a few hundredweight of hams.”
I haven’t any special objection to your writing to girls and telling them that they are the real sugar-cured article, for, after all, if you overdo it, it’s your breach-of-promise suit, but you must write before eight or after six. I have bought the stretch between those hours. Your time is money—my money—and when you take half an hour of it for your own purposes, that is just a petty form of petty larceny.
Milligan tells me that you are quick to learn, and that you can do a powerful lot of work when you’ve a mind to; but he adds that it’s mighty seldom your mind takes that particular turn. Your attention may be on the letters you are addressing, or you may be in a comatose condition mentally; he never quite knows until the returns come from the dead-letter office.
A man can’t have his head pumped out like a vacuum pan, or stuffed full of odds and ends like a bologna sausage, and do his work right. It doesn’t make any difference how mean and trifling the thing he’s doing may seem, that’s the big thing and the only thing for him just then. Business is like oil—it won’t mix with anything but business.
You can resolve everything in the world, even a great fortune, into atoms. And the fundamental principles which govern the handling of postage stamps and of millions are exactly the same. They are the common law of business, and the whole practice of commerce is founded on them. They are so simple that a fool can’t learn them; so hard that a lazy man won’t.
Boys are constantly writing me for advice about how to succeed, and when I send them my receipt they say that I am dealing out commonplace generalities. Of course I am, but that’s what the receipt calls for, and if a boy will take these commonplace generalities and knead them into his job, the mixture’ll be cake.