Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/21

 would immediately cease to employ me, and go over to Busselinck and Waterman, who are likewise coffee-brokers,—but you need not know their address. Therefore I take good care not to write any novels, nor to advance any false statements. I have always remarked that persons who do so are often badly off. I am forty-three years of age, I have visited the Exchange for the last twenty years, and, therefore, I can come forward whenever you are in want of a person of experience. How many firms do I know which have been utterly ruined! And gene­rally, when looking for the causes of their failure, it ap­peared to me that they must be attributed to the wrong direction which most of them followed in the beginning.

My maxims are, and will always be, Truth and Com­mon-sense; making, of course, an exception with regard to the Holy Scriptures. The origin of this fault may be traced to our children’s poet, Van Alphen, in his very first line, about “dear little babies.” What the deuce could make that old gentleman declare himself to be an adorer of my little sister Gertrude, who had weak eyes, or of my brother Gerard, who always played with his nose? and yet, he says, “that he sang those poems in­spired by love.” I often thought when a child; “My dear fellow, I should like to meet you once, and if you refused me the marbles which I should ask you for, or the