Ham was simply one of those fellows who not only have convolutions in their brains, but kinks and bow-knots as well, and who can believe that any sort of a lie is gospel truth just so it is manufactured and labeled on their own premises.  I confess I ran out a line of those pigs’ liver pates myself, but I didn’t do it because I was such a patriot that I couldn’t stand seeing the American flag insulted by a lot of Frenchmen getting a dollar for a ten-cent article, and that simply because geese have smaller livers than pigs.

For all Old Ham was so shrewd at the Yards, he was one of those fellows who begin losing their common-sense at the office door, and who reach home doddering and blithering.  Had a fool wife with the society bug in her head, and as he had the one-of-our-leading-citizens bug in his, they managed between them to raise a lovely warning for a Sunday-school superintendent in their son, Percival.

Percy was mommer’s angel boy with the sunny curls, who was to be raised a gentleman and to be “shielded from the vulgar surroundings and coarse associations of her husband’s youth,” and he was proud popper’s pet, whose good times weren’t going to be spoiled by a narrow-minded old brute of a father, or whose talents weren’t going to be smothered in poverty, the way the old man’s had been.  No, sir-ee, Percy was going to have all the money he wanted, with the whisky bottle always in sight on the sideboard and no limit on any game he wanted to sit in, so that he’d grow up a perfect little gentleman and know how to use things instead of abusing them.

I want to say right here that I’ve heard a good deal of talk in my time about using whisky, and I’ve met a good many thousand men who bragged when they were half loaded that they could quit at any moment, but I’ve never met one of these fellows who would while the whisky held out.  It’s been my experience that when a fellow begins to brag that he can quit whenever he wants to, he’s usually reached the point where he can’t.

Naturally, Percy had hardly got the pap-rag out of his mouth before he learned to smoke cigarettes, and he could cuss like a little gentleman before he went into long pants.  Took the four-years’ sporting course at Harvard, with a postgraduate year of draw-poker and natural history—­observing the habits and the speed of the ponies in their native haunts.  Then, just to prove that he had paresis, Old Ham gave him a million dollars outright and a partnership in his business.

Percy started in to learn the business at the top—­absorbing as much of it as he could find room for between ten and four, with two hours out for lunch—­but he never got down below the frosting.  The one thing that Old Ham wouldn’t let him touch was the only thing about the business which really interested Percy—­the speculating end of it.  But everything else he did went with the old gentleman, and he was always bragging that Percy was growing up into a big, broad-gauged merchant.  He got mighty mad with me when I told him that Percy was just a ready-made success who was so small that he rattled round in his seat, and that he’d better hold in his horses, as there were a good many humps in the road ahead of him.