the main thing. You may get a man to answer your questions in a sort
of a way but you really do not have his attention always when he talks
to you. You would better not call on a man at all than go at him in a
listless sort of a way. This is where the old timer has the bulge over
the new man. I once knew a man who had been a successful clerk for
many years who started on the road with a line of pants. He had worked
for one of my old customers. I chanced to meet him, when I was
starting on my trip, at the very time when he was making his maiden
effort at selling a bill to the man for whom he had been working. Of
course this was a push-over for him because his old employer gave him
an order as a compliment.

"Well, sir, when that fellow learned that I was going West--this was
on the Northern Pacific--he hung right on to me and said he would like
to go along. Of course, I told him I should be very glad to have him
do so, and that I would do for him whatever I could. But here he made
a mistake. When a man starts out on the road he must paddle his own
canoe. It is about as much as his friend can do to sell his own line
of goods, much less to put in a boost for somebody else. And,
furthermore, a man who takes a young chick under his wing will often
cut off some of his own feed. Still, this fellow had always been very
friendly with me and I told him, 'Why, to be sure, Henry; come right
along with me.'

"In the second and third towns that we made, he picked up a couple of
small bills that just about paid his expenses. He was just beginning
to find that the road was not such an easy path to travel as, in his
own mind, he had cracked it up to be.

"The next town we struck was Bismarck, North Dakota. We got in there