Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/303

Rh a hickory-nut. Found there was good money in that, and added grasshoppers, at two cents apiece, as a side line. Found them so popular that he took on chinch bugs at a nickel, and fairly coined money. The last I heard of Fatty he was in a Dime Museum, drawing two salaries—one as "The Fat Man," and the other as "Launcelot, The Locust Eater, the Only Man Alive with a Gizzard."

You are going to meet a heap of Fatties, first and last, fellows who'll eat a little dirt "for fun" or to show off, and who'll eat a little more because they find that there's some easy money or times in it. It's hard to get at these men, because when they've lost everything they had to be proud of, they still keep their pride. You can always bet that when a fellow's pride makes him touchy, it's because there are some mighty raw spots on it.

It's been my experience that pride is usually a spur to the strong and a drag on the