Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/251

Rh had changed his face for the one which he wore when he sold an easy customer ground peas and chicory for O. G. Java, and every now and then he gulped as if he was going to start a hymn. When Bill told him how good and bad weather sent the market up and down, he nodded and said that that part of it was all right, because the weather was of the Lord.

"Not on the Board of Trade it isn't," Bill answered back; "at least, not to any marked extent; it's from the weather man or some liar in the corn belt, and, as the weather man usually guesses wrong, I reckon there isn't any special inspiration about it. The game is to guess what's going to happen, not what has happened, and by the time the real weather comes along everybody has guessed wrong and knocked the market off a cent or two."

That made the Deacon's chin whiskers droop a little, but he began to ask questions