I USED to run a beeswax store at Punktown-in-the-Hole, and people asked me o’er and o’er, “Why don’t you deal in coal? The beeswax trade will never pay—you know that it’s a sell; if you take in ten bones a day, you think you’re doing well.”
Thus spake these thoughtful friends of mine; I heard their rigmarole, and straightway quit the beeswax line, and started selling coal. I built up quite a trade in slate, delivered by the pound, and just when I could pay the freight, my friends again came round. “Great Scott!” they cried, “you ought to quit this dark and dirty trade! To clean your face of grime and grit we’d need a hoe and spade! Quit dealing in such dusty wares, and make yourself look slick; lay in a stock of Belgian hares, and you’ll make money quick.”
I bought a thousand Belgian brutes, and watched them beige around, and said: “I’ll fatten these galoots and sell them by the pound, and then I’ll have all kinds of kale, to pleasure to devote; around this blamed old world I’ll sail in my own motor boat.” But when the hares were getting fat, my friends began to hiss: “Great Caesar! Would you look at that! What foolishness is this? Why wear out leg and back and arm pursuing idle fads? You ought to have a ginseng farm, and then you’d nail the scads.”
The scheme to me seemed good and grand; I sold the Belgian brutes, and then I bought a strip of land and planted ginseng roots. I hoped to see them come up strong, and tilled them years and years, until the sheriff came along and took me by the ears. And as he pushed me off to jail, I passed that beeswax store; the owner, loaded down with kale, was standing in the door. “If you had stayed right here,” he said, “you’d now be doing well; you would not by the ears be led toward a loathsome cell. But always to disaster wends the man who has no spine, who always listens to his friends, and thinks their counsel fine.”