No. 8
FROM John Graham, at Hot Springs, Arkansas, to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont has just been promoted from the mailing to the billing desk and, in consequence, his father is feeling rather “mellow” toward him.
VIII
Hot Springs, January 15, 189—
Dear Pierrepont: They’ve run me through the scalding vats here till they’ve pretty nearly taken all the hair off my hide, but that or something else has loosened up my joints so that they don’t squeak any more when I walk. The doctor says he’ll have my rheumatism cured in thirty days, so I guess you can expect me home in about a fortnight. For he’s the breed of doctor that is always two weeks ahead of his patients’ condition when they’re poor, and two weeks behind it when they’re rich. He calls himself a specialist, which means that it costs me ten dollars every time he has a look in at my tongue, against two that I would pay the family doctor for gratifying his curiosity. But I guess this specialist business is about the only outlet for marketing the surplus of young doctors.
Reminds me of the time when we were piling up canned corned beef in stock faster than people would eat it, and a big drought happened along in Texas and began driving the canners in to the packing-house quicker than we could tuck them away in tin. Jim Durham tried to “stimulate the consumption,” as he put it, by getting out a nice little booklet called, “A Hundred Dainty Dishes from a Can,” and telling how to work off corned beef on the family in various disguises; but, after he had schemed out ten different combinations, the other ninety turned out to be corned-beef hash. So that was no use.
But one day we got together and had a nice, fancy, appetizing label printed, and we didn’t economize on the gilt—a picture of a steer so fat that he looked as if he’d break his legs if they weren’t shored up pretty quick with props, and with blue ribbons tied to his horns. We labeled it “Blue Ribbon Beef—For Fancy Family Trade,” and charged an extra ten cents a dozen for the cans on which that special label was pasted. Of course, people just naturally wanted it.
There’s nothing helps convince some men that a thing has merit like a little gold on the label. And it’s pretty safe to bet that if a fellow needs a six or seven-syllabled word to describe his profession, he’s a corn doctor when you come to look him up in the dictionary. And then you’ll generally find him in the back part of the book where they tuck away the doubtful words.
But that isn’t what I started out to say. I want to tell you that I was very, very glad to learn from your letter that you had been promoted to the billing desk. I have felt all along that when you got a little of the nonsense tried out of you there would be a residue of common-sense, and I am glad to have your boss back up my judgment. There’s two things you just naturally don’t expect from human nature—that the widow’s tombstone estimate of the departed, on which she is trying to convince the neighbors against their better judgment that he went to Heaven, and the father’s estimate of the son, on which he is trying to pass him along into a good salary, will be conservative.