We started our profit-sharing plan, as arranged on June 1, the beginning of my fiscal year. I had thought we had so thoroughly threshed out the plan that it would work like a charm; but two months had barely passed before friction started. Larsen felt he ought to get a larger percentage of the profits than his salary called for, because he went out selling, and said that he thereby created business which no one else could get and he did his regular work besides. Whenever the boy Jimmie made a suggestion of any kind he, at the same time, added that he ought to have a special extra bonus for that suggestion, if it was any good. I talked the matter over with Jock, and finally we straightened it out, but I have not the time to tell you how we satisfied the warring elements. I would also like to tell in detail of the starting of the new chain garage plan. In three months it was already working well in Farmdale, and negotiations had been completed for the second garage in Hartleyville. We had struck an awful lot of snags in starting this plan. How to handle the store, and at the same time study automobile accessories, had been some job, but Fred Barlow and Charlie Martin were certainly live wires, and they could think up more ways of doing a thing than I ever dreamed of. I remember once reading something by Elbert Hubbard in which he said that every business required a pessimist, an optimist, and a grouch. I believed we would succeed, for old Barlow was certainly the pessimist in the bunch, and whenever Charlie or Fred went to him with any new idea they wanted to "pull off" in connection with the garage chain plan he acted like a brake to their enthusiasm--or, as he put it, kept them down to Mother Earth. Charlie's father had oodles of money, and was the principal director of the idea, and he was the grouch. Charlie used to say that his dad never believed anything until he actually saw it. "If I were to go to him," said Charlie, "and say to him, 'Dad, I made a hundred dollars to-day,' he would say, 'Show it to me,' and, if I did show it to him, he would then ask me if I had planned what I was going to do with it to make it earn more money. If I had told him I had, he would then say that either the investment I had planned was safe enough but didn't pay enough dividend--or else that it wasn't safe, although it paid a good dividend. I'd hate to have a disposition like Dad's," laughed Charlie, "and yet Dad's a good old scout, and he must believe in the plan, else he wouldn't back it the way he is doing." Charlie, Fred and I were the optimists, I guess.