Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/283

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LETTERS TO HIS SON

cago in his new book, and I told the boy to show the General in.

Fve got a pretty good memory for faces, and I'd bought too much store plug of Hank in my time not to know him, even with a clean shave and a plug hat. Some men dry up with success, but it was just spouting out of Hank. Told me he'd made his pile and that he was tired of living on the slag heap; that he'd spent his whole life where money hardly whispered, let alone talked, and he was going now where it would shout. Wanted to know what was the use of being a nob if a fellow wasn't the nobbiest sort of a nob. Said he'd bought a house on Beacon Hill, in Boston, and that if I'd prick up my ears occasionally I'd hear something drop into the Back Bay. Handed me his new card four times and explained that it was the rawest sort of dog to carry a brace of names in your card holster; that it gave you the drop on the swells every time, and that

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