The next thing to do was to increase it, and
put by money.
Prosperity depends, as we all know, in great measure upon energy and good
sense, but it also depends not a little upon pure luck--that is to say,
upon connections which are in such a tangle that it is more easy to say
that they do not exist, than to try to trace them. A neighbourhood may
have an excellent reputation as being likely to be a rising one, and yet
may become suddenly eclipsed by another, which no one would have thought
so promising. A fever hospital may divert the stream of business, or a
new station attract it; so little, indeed, can be certainly known, that
it is better not to try to know more than is in everybody's mouth, and to
leave the rest to chance.
Luck, which certainly had not been too kind to my hero hitherto, now
seemed to have taken him under her protection. The neighbourhood
prospered, and he with it. It seemed as though he no sooner bought a
thing and put it into his shop, than it sold with a profit of from thirty
to fifty per cent. He learned book-keeping, and watched his accounts
carefully, following up any success immediately; he began to buy other
things besides clothes--such as books, music, odds and ends of furniture,
etc.
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