If we decide to lynch a gent, some agent for a patent tent, or one who’s sold us mining shares, or double action easy chairs, that lumber man is right on deck, and puts the rope around his neck.
I hear folks say, “That lumber chap, has put this village on the map. If we had twenty men like him, the town would sure be in the swim. He is the first man, every time, to help to make things hump and climb.”
The business man who hopes to win must boost the town he’s living in. You cannot do the hermit stunt, and hope to travel at the front. Get next to all that’s going on, mix in with Richard, James and John, and help along the town’s affairs, and leave the grouches in their lairs.
STAIRWAYS
Some years ago I built a house in which I settled, with my spouse. It was a gorgeous shack, indeed; the kind of house of which you read. For such a house I’d always yearned, and so I said, “Expense be derned! I want the best that coin will buy; my dwelling place must stack up high. I want a dwelling that will stand till I’m so old I should be canned.”
I said, “I want a splendid stair, a stairway that’s beyond compare; the kind you read about in books, with banisters and window nooks.”
And so we built a noble stair, and it was surely passing fair; and guests who came to spend the night, when viewing it, expressed delight, and said it surely took the cake; it was a bird, and no mistake.
But when the stair was five years old its antics made my trilbys cold. It warped and twisted like the deuce, till half the steps and rails were loose, it creaked and crackled, as in pain, and warped and bent and warped again. It took a circus acrobat to climb my stairway after that.
Then came a neighbor to my door, who’d built a hundred shacks or more. He viewed my stair and shed some weeps, and said, “That is a frost, for keeps. You’d better take it out from there and get yourself a Curtis stair. The wood the Curtis people use will ne’er its right proportions lose; it will not wind around, I wist, like some dadblamed contortionist. For it is seasoned to a hair; there is no reckless guesswork there.
“The Curtis trademark on a stair just means that grief won’t travel there. You have a stairway that will last until your earthly woes are past, and you are playing golden lyres, or heaping brimstone on the fires.