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 fewer 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 bookkeeping, 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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