A number of unusual things happened in the offices that morning, and the head office boy thought Clarence might be able to explain some of them, but he had an alibi ready every time--even when a bookkeeper found the vault filled with cigarette smoke and Clarence in it hunting for something he couldn't describe. But as he was a new boy, no one was disposed to bear down on him very hard, so his cigarettes were taken away from him and he was sent back to his bench with a warning that he had used up all his explanations. Along toward noon, a big Boston customer came in with his little boy--a nice, plump, stall-fed youngster, with black velvet pants and hair that was just a little longer than was safe in the stock-yards district. And while we were talking business, the kid wandered off to the coat-room, where the errand boys were eating lunch, which was a pretty desperate place for a boy with velvet pants on to go. [Illustration: "_Clarence looked to me like another of his father's bad breaks._"] As far as we could learn from Willie when he came out of his convulsions, the boys had been very polite to him and had insisted on his joining in a new game which Clarence had just invented, called playing pig-sticker. And, because he was company, Clarence told him that he could be the pig. Willie didn't know just what being the pig meant, but, as he told his father, it didn't sound very nice and he was afraid he wouldn't like it. So he tried to pass along the honor to some one else, but Clarence insisted that it was "hot stuff to be the pig," and before Willie could rightly judge what was happening to him, one end of a rope had been tied around his left ankle and the other end had been passed over a transom bar, and he was dangling headforemost in the air, while Clarence threatened his jugular with a lath sword. That was when he let out the yell which brought his father and me on the jump and scattered the boys all over the stock yards. Willie's father canceled his bologna contract and marched off muttering something about "degrading surroundings brutalizing the young;" and Clarence's mother wrote me that I was a bad old man who had held her husband down all his life and now wouldn't give her son a show. For, naturally, after that little incident, I had told the boy who had been raised a pet that he had better go back to the menagerie. I simply mention Clarence in passing as an instance of why I am a little slow to trust my judgment on my own. I have always found that, whenever I thought a heap of anything I owned, there was nothing like getting the other fellow's views expressed in figures; and the other fellow is usually a pessimist when he's buying. The lady on the dollar is the only woman who hasn't any sentiment in her make-up. And if you really want a look at the solid facts of a thing you must strain off the sentiment first.