The business man who hopes to win must boost the town he’s living in. You cannot do the hermit stunt, and hope to travel at the front. Get next to all that’s going on, mix in with Richard, James and John, and help along the town’s affairs, and leave the grouches in their lairs. STAIRWAYS Some years ago I built a house in which I settled, with my spouse. It was a gorgeous shack, indeed; the kind of house of which you read. For such a house I’d always yearned, and so I said, “Expense be derned! I want the best that coin will buy; my dwelling place must stack up high. I want a dwelling that will stand till I’m so old I should be canned.” I said, “I want a splendid stair, a stairway that’s beyond compare; the kind you read about in books, with banisters and window nooks.” And so we built a noble stair, and it was surely passing fair; and guests who came to spend the night, when viewing it, expressed delight, and said it surely took the cake; it was a bird, and no mistake. But when the stair was five years old its antics made my trilbys cold. It warped and twisted like the deuce, till half the steps and rails were loose, it creaked and crackled, as in pain, and warped and bent and warped again. It took a circus acrobat to climb my stairway after that. Then came a neighbor to my door, who’d built a hundred shacks or more. He viewed my stair and shed some weeps, and said, “That is a frost, for keeps. You’d better take it out from there and get yourself a Curtis stair. The wood the Curtis people use will ne’er its right proportions lose; it will not wind around, I wist, like some dadblamed contortionist. For it is seasoned to a hair; there is no reckless guesswork there. “The Curtis trademark on a stair just means that grief won’t travel there. You have a stairway that will last until your earthly woes are past, and you are playing golden lyres, or heaping brimstone on the fires. “Your warped old stairway yet will wreck some fellow’s back or break his neck, so pull it down, I humbly beg, before there is a broken leg. Then get the Curtis seasoned wood, and have a stairway staunch and good, and you will bless me every day for showing you the proper way.” And now a noble Curtis stair adds grace and comfort to my lair; I never find it on the blink, it doesn’t warp or split or shrink. ALL THE TIME This is the burden of my rhyme: Be nice and pleasant all the time. Some men are only sweet and nice, when they desire to get the price. The lumber men at Bungtown hear that I intend, some time this year, to build a handsome Gothic shed, all up to date and painted red. At ordinary times these gents don’t smile at me worth twenty cents. They pass me by and do not say, “How is your liver?” or “Good day!” But since they’ve heard that I expect to build a shed that’s all correct, a modern shed with wooden doors and handsome knotholes in the floors, they’re so polite and smooth and sweet, they give me fantods in my feet.