In this connection, the story of Lemuel Hostitter, who kept the corner grocery in my old town, naturally comes to mind. Lem was probably the meanest white man in the State of Missouri, and it wasn’t any walk-over to hold the belt in those days. Most grocers were satisfied to adulterate their coffee with ground peas, but Lem was so blamed mean that he adulterated the peas first. Bought skin-bruised hams and claimed that the bruise was his private and particular brand, stamped in the skin, showing that they were a fancy article, packed expressly for his fancy family trade. Ran a soda-water fountain in the front of his store with home-made syrups that ate the lining out of the children’s stomachs, and a blind tiger in the back room with moonshine whiskey that pickled their daddies’ insides. Take it by and large, Lem’s character smelled about as various as his store, and that wasn’t perfumed with lily-of-the-valley, you bet.
One time and another most men dropped into Lem’s store of an evening, because there wasn’t any other place to go and swap lies about the crops and any of the neighbors who didn’t happen to be there. As Lem was always around, in the end he was the only man in town whose meanness hadn’t been talked over in that grocery. Naturally, he began to think that he was the only decent white man in the county. Got to shaking his head and reckoning that the town was plum rotten. Said that such goings on would make a pessimist of a goat. Wanted to know if public opinion couldn’t be aroused so that decency would have a show in the village.
Most men get information when they ask for it, and in the end Lem fetched public opinion all right. One night the local chapter of the W.C.T.U. borrowed all the loose hatchets in town and made a good, clean, workmanlike job of the back part of his store, though his whiskey was so mean that even the ground couldn’t soak it up. The noise brought out the men, and they sort of caught the spirit of the happy occasion. When they were through, Lem’s stock and fixtures looked mighty sick, and they had Lem on a rail headed for the county line.
I don’t know when I’ve seen a more surprised man than Lem. He couldn’t cuss even. But as he never came back, to ask for any explanation, I reckon he figured it out that they wanted to get rid of him because he was too good for the town.
I simply mention Lem in passing as an example of the fact that when you’re through sizing up the other fellow, it’s a good thing to step back from yourself and see how you look. Then add fifty per cent. to your estimate of your neighbor for virtues that you can’t see, and deduct fifty per cent. from yourself for faults that you’ve missed in your inventory, and you’ll have a pretty accurate result.
Your affectionate father,
John Graham.
No. 16
FROM John Graham, at the Schweitzerkasenhof, Karlsbad, Austria, to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont has shown mild symptoms of an attack of society fever, and his father is administering some simple remedies.