[Companions.]
Truth of the adage that a Man Is Known by the Company He Keeps—Tam O'Shanter's Habits—Building a House With a Party-Wall—Playing Billiards at Noon-Time—Smelling of the Smoke of the Kitchen—Bar-Room Manners—Judging a Man by His Clothes—A Piece of Impertinence which Cost the Keeping of Five Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars—"The Companion of Fools Shall Be Destroyed"—Learn to Admire Rightly—Charm which the Look of Certain Loafers Has for Many Young Men—Getting a Sitting in Church—Keep in Company Where You Will Be Under a Pleasant Restraint—Either Wise Bearing or Ignorant Carriage Is Caught, as Men Take Diseases One from Another.
[On The Road.]
Natural Depression—Certainty of Its Discontinuance—The Best Salesmen Have Been Very Soft-Hearted on Their Early Trips—Entering the Town—Riding One Block for Half a Dollar—A Poor Meal—Getting Your Wind—Planning the Charge—Canvassing Yourself—What Is the Almost Limitless Power of Persuasion?—Abraham Lincoln—The Whisky Which Made Generals Win Battles was the Kind of Whisky He Was in Search of—Your Dress—Your Entrance at Your Customer's Place—Your Speed in Getting Started—Your Ease after the Start Is Made—Never Stop the Customer—Your Perfect Accuracy as to Men and Places—Story of a Meteoric Salesman—Trouble of Putting a Stop to his Flight—Your Supper Tastes Good—The Men of Cold Exterior—Stay Out but Do not Stay Up—How to Get Vim and Sparkle—Extraordinary Value of a Man Who Can "Place Goods."
[Examples.]
The Tracks of Giants—Napoleonic Miracles—Webster and Astor—George Peabody—Giving Away Eight Millions of Dollars—Stewart—Andrew Johnson—Barnum and Stanford—Ulysses S. Grant—Commodore Vanderbilt—Elihu Burritt—Edgar Poe—Greeley, Chase, Garfield and William Tecumseh Sherman—Tennyson—Robert E. Lee—Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg—James Gordon Bennett—Carlyle and Victor Hugo—Garibaldi —Agassiz, Humboldt, Proctor, Seward, Farragut, Nelson, Abercrombie, Joseph E. Johnston, Longstreet, and Fifty Others—The Habit of Riding Over Obstacles—Herodotus, Seneca and Franklin on the Power of Example—Christ Never Wrote a Tract—The System of Redoubling the Effort and Coming out, after one Victory, Ahead after Reckoning all Losses.
[Man.]
Shakspeare's Eulogy, just as He Penned It—Emerson—A Columbus of the Skies—Carlyle's Panegyric—Whately—Man's Faults—Horace Man and Pascal—The Poet Cowley and Boileau—Fallacy of their Scoldings as Applied to all Humankind—What Is Man?—Plato's Answer—Addison's Answer—Burke's Answer—Adam Smith's Answer—Buffon's Failure to Make a Satisfactory Answer—Plutarch's Answer—"The Proper Study of Mankind is Man"—Henry Giles and John Ruskin—The Wonderful Instrument Called the Hand—The Violin Slave—Man's Opportunities—What God has Said of His Children—The Beautiful Language in Which It is Written—Nobility of Our Destiny—A Stinging Epigram.
[Woman.]
The Hand That Made Woman Fair Made Her Good—Wordsworth's Beautiful lines to His Wife—"She Was a Phantom of Delight"—Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope"—A Pleasant Subject—The Difference Between Love in Man and Love in Woman—Jean Paul Richter's Encomium—Schiller's Tribute—Shelley—Shakspeare—Rousseau, Barrett and Balzac—The Duke of Halifax—Addison—Boyle—Sex in The Soul—Woman's Love of Ornament—Her Dress the Perfection of What Man Demands of Her—Dr. Johnson's Explanation—Testimony of John Ledyard to the Goodness of Woman—His History—Woman's Enormous Influence over Man—How Men Live Where There Are No Women—The History of Human Sickness a Monument of the Goodness of Woman.