IN YOUR MONEY MATTERS,

you cannot make yourself so valuable to your employer that he will not, before he advances you, inquire into your personal expenses, and find out what you do with your money.  If you have spent it, year after year, as fast as you could get it, he will have great misgivings about letting you into a position where your desire to distribute currency can possibly lead you to practice on his funds.  Among the easy ways to spend money in a small town is the habit of hiring livery-rigs.  The business is just as useful as a drug-store, but no poor boy should hire equipages for mere pleasure.  To attend a funeral, or to take a sick mother or sister out in the sunshine, is commendable.  The youth who does that rarely needs the other suggestion, however, for those who spend the most money at a livery stable are usually seen with their mothers and sisters the least.  No young man who thinks well of himself will enter a saloon at all.  Often the worst classes in the whole country frequent

RURAL SALOONS,

men who dare not walk through the streets of any of the large cities.  Perhaps at the card-table in the groggery across the street is a man who has come to your town to break into your employer’s store!  Anyway, there is no “business” in the world which returns so little for the money accepted as the saloon.  Take

A GALLON OF WHISKY,

for instance.  It is worth a dollar to a dollar and a half.  It has been taxed ninety cents by the Government, leaving it worth that much less.  Well, now, a man is expected to go into a saloon, and, for about three tablespoonsful of this stuff, he pays ten cents in the town and fifteen cents in the city.  Your news dealer pays eight cents for an illustrated paper, and twenty-eight cents for a popular magazine.  He sells the one for ten cents and the other for thirty-five cents, taking all the risk of not getting a sale.  If you could afford to travel with such people as are found in saloons, in the first place, and to put such truly abominable stuff in your mouth in the second place, you could not, even then, in the third place, afford to give fifteen cents for what is in fact worth less than a mill.  You are in reality giving away your money to the Government and the saloon keeper.

LET VANDERBILT SUPPORT THE GOVERNMENT,

and those who have made their fortunes and their bad habits the saloon-keeper.  I have dwelt on this, because these are few young men who are not tempted.  All the above applies to tobacco.  It is an utterly obnoxious habit to use tobacco.  It is the cause, together with the dough falsely called pastry, of all the dyspepsia in our climate.  It ruins the eyes, it costs money in vast quantities, returning almost nothing in goods, and has but one redeeming feature that I know of—­it is