Some merchants are so all-fired dumb, you wonder how they ever come to sell the stuff they have in store, and keep the sheriff from the door. Old Binkson is a lot that way; he seldom has a word to say. I ask him for a pound of lime; he wraps it up, and all the time, he wears a tragic air of doom, and sheds an atmosphere of gloom. He never chats, he never spiels, nor jumps up high and cracks his heels. He isn’t grouchy or unstrung; he never learned to wag his tongue.
Oh, silence is a golden thing, when ’tisn’t worked too hard, by jing. But none of us will stand up strong for men who gabble all day long, and elocute a thousand miles in fifty-seven varied styles. The dealer who is prone to talk until you hear him round a block, is worse than t’other kind of bird, who’s never known to spring a word.
But if you’ve scantling you would sell, you ought to boost it wisely well, and if a gent should buy a plank, to build himself a dipping tank, you might suggest ere home he speeds, that you have other things he needs.
I called on Lumber Dealer Gaff, to buy a shingle and a half. He put my purchase in a sack, and wrapped a string around and back, and as he toiled, in manner gay, he talked to pass the time away.
“The farmers now, in busy troops, are building stately chicken coops; the winter soon will hit the road, and hens must have a warm abode, or they won’t lay their luscious eggs, but stand around on frozen legs.”
And that recalled the fact to me that I had hens, some ninety-three, and ere I left that lumber store, I bought a wagon load or more, of stuff to build a chicken shed; it’s standing now, all painted red.
And that’s the way big sales are made, and that is how men build up trade. Talk corn cribs at the proper time, or prove a silo is sublime, but in an incidental strain, and not as though you gladly sprain your conscience—which I hope is hale—in eagerness to get the kale.
Suggestion is a noble art; the wise man gets it down by heart.