His reading has been confined to his Trade Magazine, his home town daily, and his competitors’ catalogues. The people he has met socially are the same earspreaders he used to know as boys and girls in the days when he was juggling up the mail in the leather sack, size 24″ x 36″. The men he has met in a business way, all have come down to the bowlegged burg to sell him something, and so he has always had eager listeners whenever he talked from the chest out; so he has been denied the golden privilege of having men tell him to his cone-shaped face just what they thought of him and his Ideas. In other phraseology, Alfred William Clerkmind, executive, is Alfred William Clerkmind, office boy, with different scenery. His arms and legs are longer, his body thicker, his head fatter than when he licked stamps, but his psychology and general outlook are the same. He tells his New York Salesman that one can live for four dollars a week at the best boarding house in Skunkton with Neapolitan ice cream every Sunday, and therefore any man should be able to do the same in New York—or do better, because there’s a bigger choice in Noo Yoark. Every time it comes to changing copy in the ads, they have to throw him and blindfold him to keep him from re-writing it himself and running in a lot of snappy, pungent stuff of the come-one-come-all, we-strive-to-please variety. Alfred William doesn’t understand why a salesman should ride in a Pullman any more than why the Trade shouldn’t wiggle up on its abdomen and beg for the Goods. And since he has not the time to travel, nor read, nor meet people who do, he has no way of getting at the facts of business. He feels that he must personally ooze into every part of the works at all times. And, as a consequence, none of the department heads cares to assume the responsibility of sealing an envelope without getting Alfie’s “O. K.” Sometimes Alfie tries to be a good fellow, and thereupon he slaps somebody a wooden slap on the back. But there’s something in his playfulness that makes the recip. feel like turning around and spreading his resentment all over Alfie’s respectable features. When anybody is relating a humorsome narrative, Alfie sets a certain time and place to laugh regardless of the development of the story, and then there’s no telling how long the rafters are going to hold out. Then just as suddenly he gets back into his coffin and pulls down the lid. At such times Alfie’s voice has about as much merriment in it as a sack of dried apples, but whenever he decides to burst forth, all the little office gnats have got to laugh too, for fear they will lose their Fifty Dollar jobs if they don’t.