“So the boy went away bounding like a rubber-ball and planned his campaign. I won’t bother you by trying to tell you what it was.... It wouldn’t interest you, and anyhow you couldn’t understand the business details. It was a mixture of intensive publicity, special attention paid to detail, a follow-up system that meant personal care and personal acquaintance with the tastes of customers, and intimate knowledge of what past orders from customers had been. To get the right kind of assistants he went through the various departments of that big organization and hand-picked his staff; the very best of the publicity men, the smartest of the order-clerks, the brightest of the stenographers. And then they just tore in and ate up the territory they were practising on! They plowed it with publicity, and sowed it with personal service, they reaped, by George, a harvest that would put your eye out! Business increased by a twenty-five per cent, by a fifty per cent! At the end of a year, the boy, too big for his skin, paraded into the Manager-in-chief’s office with statistics to prove a seventy-five per cent increase over any business ever done there before! Well, that was simply grand, wasn’t it? Yes, the Manager would certainly sit up and take some notice of a system that had accomplished _that_!” My cousin had finished his cigar, now threw the butt into the fire-place, and sat looking at the embers with a somber expression. I couldn’t see anything to look somber about. Indeed I found myself stifling a yawn. What did I care how much business a mail-order house did or how they did it? My cousin answered my thought, “Don’t you see that the story is all about the same general idea you were all discussing this evening? It is about getting things done more intelligently, more efficiently, about avoiding fool mistakes, about rising to big opportunities, about learning how to scramble over the obstacles that prevent human beings from being intelligent and efficient and effective. Now, then, at the first take-off, the boy had soared right over those obstacles, hadn’t he? But the Manager-in-chief knew a thing or two about them, too. In fact he had grown bald and gray trying to climb over those very same obstacles. But you can be sure the boy didn’t once think that his chief might be just as anxious as he was to have things done better. Boys never do....” There was a pause, while my cousin considered the embers moodily. “So, by and by, after the boy had fizzed the place all foamy with his wonderful statistics, the bald-headed, gray-haired Manager began to come down to brass tacks, and to inquire just how the thing had been done. The boy was crazy to tell him, went into every detail; and the Manager listened hard.