Our total sales for the second week were $401.75, over a hundred dollars better than the previous week. Nothing like the $560.00 a week that Jim Simpson had led me to believe the store was doing, but not so bad as it might be. There was one thing I wished, however, and that was that we had a larger cash trade. Out of the $400.00 business we did the second week, $160.00 was charged. I found out that Jim Simpson had had a whole lot of book debts owing him; but, instead of turning them over to me at a discount, as the accountant told me he should have done, he had collected what bills he could, and then gave the others receipts in full for whatever they could pay. I didn't know how much he got this way, but old Peter Bender, the carpenter, had come in for some goods, $18.75 worth, charged, and had told Larsen that Jim had gone to him just before he left town and had given him a "clear bill of health," as he called it, for $10.00, in settlement of his account of sixty odd dollars. I told Larsen, whom I called the manager, that we must cut down the charge business and build up the cash trade. Larsen shrugged his shoulders and said, "It's up to you, Boss." Larsen hadn't seemed to warm up to me at all after that scrap over the two weeks' pay that Jim did him out of, even after I had told him that I would consider him manager under me. . . . At the beginning of the third week I put in three days of the hardest work I ever did in my life. I suppose my help thought I had a cinch because I had been working out a division of expenses with the aid of the accountant! I know when I was at Barlow's we clerks used to grumble because we did all the work while old Barley Water, as we called him, used to spend so much time in his little office. I wished I could make my help understand that I was working for them as well as myself, but I guessed it was hopeless, so I didn't try--then. Well, this is how we divided expenses. The accountant said: "Let us feegure our plans for the coming year on the assumption that ye'll do $30,000.00 worth o' beesiness. That is an increase of more than $7,000.00, but this store ought to do much more than that. "Your total expenses should be aboot twenty per cent. of sales, or a total of $6,000.00." "What are they at present?" I asked, rather shamefacedly, for I felt I ought to know such an important thing as that. The accountant perceived my look and he squeezed my arm sympathetically, as he said: "Dinna worry aboot that, laddie. Ye're noo worse off than a lot o' others I ken in that respect. Not half the dealers in the country have an analysis o' their expenses." That accountant was a brick. Well, the accountant told me that my present expenses were, in round figures, $7,000.00. "Gee! that's fierce!" I said. "Have I got to cut down expenses $1,000.00?" "That's just aboot what ye hae to do," was the grave reply. "But how?" I said, perplexed. "I can't possibly do it."