The fellow hawed and choked and wiped away a tear. Finally, he fetched out that he loved the dog like a son, and that it broke his heart to think of parting with him; that he wouldn’t dare look Dandy in the face after he had named the price he was asking for him, and that it was the record-breaking, marked-down sacrifice sale of the year on dogs; that it wasn’t really money he was after, but a good home for the little chap. Said that I had a rather pleasant face and he knew that he could trust me to treat Dandy kindly; so—as a gift—he would let me have him for five hundred.
“Cents?” says I.
“Dollars,” says he, without blinking.
“It ought to be a mastiff at that price,” says I.
“If you thought more of quality,” says he, in a tone of sort of dignified reproof, “and less of quantity, your brand would enjoy a better reputation.”
I was pretty hot, I can tell you, but I had laid myself open, so I just said: “The sausage business is too poor to warrant our paying any such price for light-weights. Bring around a bigger dog and then we’ll talk;” but the fellow only shook his head sadly, whistled to Dandy, and walked off.
I simply mention this little incident as an example of the fact that when a man cracks a joke in the Middle Ages he’s apt to affect the sausage market in the Nineteenth Century, and to lay open an honest butcher to the jeers of every dog-stealer in the street. There’s such a thing as carrying a joke too far, and the fellow who keeps on pretending to believe that he’s paying for pork and getting dog is pretty apt to get dog in the end.
But all that aside, I want you to get it firmly fixed in your mind right at the start that this trip is only an experiment, and that I am not at all sure you were cut out by the Lord to be a drummer. But you can figure on one thing—that you will never become the pride of the pond by starting out to cut figure eights before you are firm on your skates.
A real salesman is one-part talk and nine-parts judgment; and he uses the nine-parts of judgment to tell when to use the one-part of talk. Goods ain’t sold under Marquess of Queensberry rules any more, and you’ll find that knowing how many rounds the Old ’Un can last against the Boiler-Maker won’t really help you to load up the junior partner with our Corn-fed brand hams.
A good many salesmen have an idea that buyers are only interested in baseball, and funny stories, and Tom Lipton, and that business is a side line with them; but as a matter of fact mighty few men work up to the position of buyer through giving up their office hours to listening to anecdotes. I never saw one that liked a drummer’s jokes more than an eighth of a cent a pound on a tierce of lard. What the house really sends you out for is orders.