If you ever perceive a man setting up as a merchant or a manufacturer, or going into the cotton or tobacco trade, or any of those eccentric pursuits; or getting to be a drygoods dealer, or soap-boiler, or something of that kind; or pretending to be a lawyer, or a blacksmith, or a physician —­ any thing out of the usual way —­ you may set him down at once as a genius, and then, according to the rule-of-three, he’s an ass.

Now I am not in any respect a genius, but a regular business man.  My Day-book and Ledger will evince this in a minute.  They are well kept, though I say it myself; and, in my general habits of accuracy and punctuality, I am not to be beat by a clock.  Moreover, my occupations have been always made to chime in with the ordinary habitudes of my fellowmen.  Not that I feel the least indebted, upon this score, to my exceedingly weak-minded parents, who, beyond doubt, would have made an arrant genius of me at last, if my guardian angel had not come, in good time, to the rescue.  In biography the truth is every thing, and in autobiography it is especially so —­ yet I scarcely hope to be believed when I state, however solemnly, that my poor father put me, when I was about fifteen years of age, into the counting-house of what be termed “a respectable hardware and commission merchant doing a capital bit of business!” A capital bit of fiddlestick!  However, the consequence of this folly was, that in two or three days, I had to be sent home to my button-headed family in a high state of fever, and with a most violent and dangerous pain in the sinciput, all around about my organ of order.  It was nearly a gone case with me then —­ just touch-and-go for six weeks —­ the physicians giving me up and all that sort of thing.  But, although I suffered much, I was a thankful boy in the main.  I was saved from being a “respectable hardware and commission merchant, doing a capital bit of business,” and I felt grateful to the protuberance which had been the means of my salvation, as well as to the kindhearted female who had originally put these means within my reach.

The most of boys run away from home at ten or twelve years of age, but I waited till I was sixteen.  I don’t know that I should have gone even then, if I had not happened to hear my old mother talk about setting me up on my own hook in the grocery way.  The grocery way! —­ only think of that!  I resolved to be off forthwith, and try and establish myself in some decent occupation, without dancing attendance any longer upon the caprices of these eccentric old people, and running the risk of being made a genius of in the end.  In this project I succeeded perfectly well at the first effort, and by the time I was fairly eighteen, found myself doing an extensive and profitable business in the Tailor’s Walking-Advertisement line.