A STORY FOR BOYS | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 13, 1896

A STORY FOR BOYS.

“We have had a good many boys with us, from time to time,” said Mr. Alden, the senior member of a large hardware establishment on Market Street, Philadelphia, “as apprentices, to learn the business. What may surprise you is that we never take country boys, unless they live in the city with some relative who takes care of them and keeps them home at night; for when a country boy comes to the city to live, everything is new to him, and he is attracted by every show-window and unusual sight. The city boy, accustomed to these things, cares little for them, and if he has a good mother, he is at home and in bed in due season. And we are very particular about our boys, and before accepting one as an apprentice, we must know that he comes of honest and industrious parents.

“But the best boy we ever had is now with us, and a member of the firm. I used often to say to him: ‘Jones, your memory is worth more than a gold mine. How do you manage to remember?’”

“‘I make it my business to remember,’ he would say. ‘I know that if I can remember a man and call him by name when he comes into the store, and can ask him how things are going on where he lives, I will be very likely to keep him as a customer.’”

“And that was the exact case. He made friends of buyers. He took the same interest in the purchasers that he took in the store, and would go to no end of trouble to suit them, and to fulfill to the letter everything he promised.

“Well, affairs went on this way until he had been with us eleven years, when we concluded to take him in as a partner. We knew that he had no extravagant habits, that he neither used tobacco nor beer, nor went to the theater. He continued, as at the beginning, to board at home, and even when his salary was the very lowest, he paid his mother two dollars a week for his board. He was always neatly dressed, and we thought it

was very probable that he had laid by one or two thousand dollars, as his salary for the last two years had been twelve hundred dollars. So when we made him the offer to become a partner in the business, and suggested that it would be more satisfactory if he could put some money in the firm, he replied:—

“‘If ten thousand dollars will be any object, I can put in that much. I have saved out of my salary nine thousand four hundred dollars, and my sister will let me have six hundred.’”

“I can tell you I was never more astonished in my life than when that fellow said he could put in ten thousand dollars, and the most of it his own money. He had never spent a dollar, or twenty-five cents, or five cents, for an unnecessary thing, and kept his money in a bank, where it gathered a small interest. I am a great believer in the Bible, you know, and I always kept two placards in big letters up in the store. On one was this text, ‘He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much;’ and on the other, ‘A man diligent in his business shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men.’ And Frank Jones’ success was the literal fulfillment of those two texts. He had been faithful in the smallest things, as in the greatest ones, and diligent in business. ‘That kind of a boy always succeeds,’ concluded Mr. Alden.—Wide Awake.