In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without
boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and
more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the
list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate
allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully,
I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less
paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the
house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to
buy any baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the
reply. "What!" exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do
you mean to starve us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors
so well off -- that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by
some magic, wealth and standing followed -- he had said to himself:
I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I
can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have
done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He
had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth
the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it
was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while
to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but
I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the
less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and
instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my
baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling
them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one
kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the
others?
Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any
room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but