Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/82

Rh easy thing. Every time I went into a store there was a bull movement. The clerks all knocked off their regular work and started in to mark up prices.

They used to tell me that they didn't have any gold-brick men over there. So they don't. They deal in pictures—old masters, they call them. I bought two—you know the ones—those hanging in the waiting-room at the stock yards; and when I got back I found out that they had been painted by a measly little fellow who went to Paris to study art, after Bill Harris had found out that he was no good as a settling clerk. I keep 'em to remind myself that there's no fool like an old American fool when he gets this picture paresis.

The fellow who tried to fit me out with a coat-of-arms didn't find me so easy. I picked mine when I first went into business for myself—a charging steer—and it's registered at Washington. It's my