“Oh punk.  I don’t see what’s the use of law-school—­or even finishing high school.  I don’t want to go to college ’specially.  Honest, there’s lot of fellows that have graduated from colleges that don’t begin to make as much money as fellows that went to work early.  Old Shimmy Peters, that teaches Latin in the High, he’s a what-is-it from Columbia and he sits up all night reading a lot of greasy books and he’s always spieling about the ‘value of languages,’ and the poor soak doesn’t make but eighteen hundred a year, and no traveling salesman would think of working for that.  I know what I’d like to do.  I’d like to be an aviator, or own a corking big garage, or else—­a fellow was telling me about it yesterday—­I’d like to be one of these fellows that the Standard Oil Company sends out to China, and you live in a compound and don’t have to do any work, and you get to see the world and pagodas and the ocean and everything!  And then I could take up correspondence-courses.  That’s the real stuff!  You don’t have to recite to some frosty-faced old dame that’s trying to show off to the principal, and you can study any subject you want to.  Just listen to these!  I clipped out the ads of some swell courses.”

He snatched from the back of his geometry half a hundred advertisements of those home-study courses which the energy and foresight of American commerce have contributed to the science of education.  The first displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk socks, and hair like patent leather.  Standing with one hand in his trousers-pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads, and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity.  Above the picture was an inspiring educational symbol—­no antiquated lamp or torch or owl of Minerva, but a row of dollar signs.  The text ran: 

     $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
     Power and prosperity in public speaking

     A Yarn Told at the Club

Who do you think I ran into the other evening at the De Luxe Restaurant?  Why, old Freddy Durkee, that used to be a dead or-alive shipping clerk in my old place—­Mr. Mouse-Man we used to laughingly call the dear fellow.  One time he was so timid he was plumb scared of the Super, and never got credit for the dandy work he did.  Him at the De Luxe!  And if he wasn’t ordering a tony feed with all the “fixings” from celery to nuts!  And instead of being embarrassed by the waiters, like he used to be at the little dump where we lunched in Old Lang Syne, he was bossing them around like he was a millionaire!

I cautiously asked him what he was doing.  Freddy laughed and said, “Say, old chum, I guess you’re wondering what’s come over me.  You’ll be glad to know I’m now Assistant Super at the old shop, and right on the High Road to Prosperity and Domination, and I look forward with confidence to a twelve-cylinder car, and the wife is making things hum in the best society and the kiddies getting a first-class education.”