"No, it's not any one of those causes," said Jack, meditatively. "It's that big engine down there eating up coal and the carrying charge to get the flour to market. That's what ails the business. Look, now; see that farmer with a load of wheat on the scales. There's father out there taking a handful out of one sack and a cupful out of another. (Look out, dad, you may strike a nest of screenings shot into the middle of one of those sacks with a stove pipe.) He's bought the load and now it's going into the hopper, where it will in all probability be mixed with inferior grades. Then people complain the flour is no good, and you grind up a lot of corn meal and feed it back into the flour, or regrind with some middlings, until one can't tell whether it is flour or hog feed, and where are the profits? Now, let me tell you. I was listening the other day to that little alderman over in the second ward. He was talking politics and business, and when he was not roasting 'Bob' Ingersoll or General Grant he was making fun of Illinois River millers. He said--and you know what a big voice the little fellow has--he said this: 'There's a town up by St. Anthony's Falls that will turn out more flour in a day than we turn out in a week, and you know we are some pumpkins with our flour barrels, ain't we?'" "Say, kid, you're sure of what you just said?" asked the miller, interestedly. "Sure as I live," replied Jack; "why?" "Well, I'm goin' up to see that bit of water near St. Paul." "The nearest town is Minneapolis, a little suburb of St. Paul," answered Jack, remembering his geography lessons. Between oiling machinery, sacking bran, sewing flour sacks, heading barrels, sweeping, and occasionally "learning his trade," as he called it, over in the cooper shop, Jack got to be pretty well posted on the manufacture of flour, but he did not like the business and finally gave it up, deciding to take up the mercantile sphere and quit the field wherein the foundations of the most gigantic fortunes were just ready for the superstructure--flour, oil, harvest machinery and provisions, to say nothing of the contributory railway and telegraph business. He went to Boston, secured a position in a large wholesale establishment, lived in one of the beautiful suburban cities which surround the "Hub" on three sides, and there learned the lessons of prudence, sharp buying and economical, labor-saving methods, which were in contrast with the wastefulness and unsystematic methods prevalent in the great west. Not long after Jack was well established his father packed up the family belongings and moved where he could be with his son.