Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/30

 I have calculated that our firm, during the last fifty years, has gained four hundred thousand guilders by Stern. Our connexion dates from the beginning of the continental system, when we smuggled Colonial produce and such like things from Heligoland. No, I won’t reduce the brokerage.

I went to the Polen coffee-house, ordered pen and paper, and wrote:—

“That because of the many honoured commissions received from North Germany, our business transactions had been extended”—[it is the simple truth]—“and that this necessitated an augmentation of our staff”—[it is the truth: no more than yesterday evening our bookkeeper was in the office after eleven o’clock to look for his spectacles];—“that, above all things, we were in great want of respectable, educated young men to conduct the German correspondence. That, certainly, there were many young Germans in Amsterdam, who possessed the requisite qualifications, but that a respectable firm”—[it is the very truth],—“seeing the frivolity and immorality of young men, and the daily increasing number of adventurers, and with an eye to the necessity of making correctness of conduct go hand in hand with correctness in the execution of orders”—[it is the truth, observe, and nothing but the truth],—“that such a firm—I mean Last and Co., coffee-brokers, 37 Laurier Canal—could not be anxious enough in engaging new hands.”

All that is the simple truth, reader. Do you know