It’s better to go slow and lose a good bargain occasionally than to go fast and never get a bargain.  It’s all right to take a long chance now and then, when you’ve got a long bank account, but it’s been my experience that most of the long chances are taken by the fellows with short bank accounts.

You’ll meet a lot of men in Chicago who’ll point out the corner of State and Madison and tell you that when they first came to the city they were offered that lot for a hundred dollars, and that it’s been the crowning regret of their lives that they didn’t buy it.  But for every genuine case of crowning regret because a fellow didn’t buy, there are a thousand because he did.  Don’t let it make you feverish the next time you see one of those Won’t-you-come-in-quick-and-get-rich-sudden ads.  Freeze up and on to your thousand, and by and by you’ll get a chance to buy a little stock in the concern for which you’re working and which you know something about; or to take that thousand and one or two more like it, and buy an interest in a nice little business of the breed that you’ve been grooming and currying for some other fellow.  But if your money’s tied up in the sudden—­millionaire business, you’ll have to keep right on clerking.

A man’s fortune should grow like a tree, in rings around the parent trunk.  It’ll be slow work at first, but every ring will be a little wider and a little thicker than the last one, and by and by you’ll be big enough and strong enough to shed a few acorns within easy reaching distance, and so start a nice little nursery of your own from which you can saw wood some day.  Whenever you hear of a man’s jumping suddenly into prominence and fortune, look behind the popular explanation of a lucky chance.  You’ll usually find that these men manufactured their own luck right on the premises by years of slow preparation, and are simply realizing on hard work.

Speaking of manufacturing luck on the premises, naturally calls to mind the story of old Jim Jackson, “dealer in mining properties,” and of young Thornley Harding, graduate of Princeton and citizen of New York.

Thorn wasn’t a bad young fellow, but he’d been brought up by a nice, hard-working, fond and foolish old papa, in the fond belief that his job in life was to spend the income of a million.  But one week papa failed, and the next week he died, and the next Thorn found he had to go to work.  He lasted out the next week on a high stool, and then he decided that the top, where there was plenty of room for a bright young man, was somewhere out West.

Thorn’s life for the next few years was the whole series of hard-luck parables, with a few chapters from Job thrown in, and then one day he met old Jim.  He seemed to cotton to Thorn from the jump.  Explained to him that there was nothing in this digging gopher holes in the solid rock and eating Chinaman’s grub for the sake of making niggers’ wages.  Allowed that he was letting other fellows dig the holes,