Irvin S. Cobb's Idea of Sawmilling

,Irvin S. Cobb, the humorist, tells a story of an office man for a Chicago lumber concern who decided to'get into the business on his own account. Sight unseen for cash, he purchased a milling property in the White River bottorns of Arkansas at a figure,which seemled to him highly attractive. He settled up his affairs in the icity and cau,ght a train for the South to take'ove,r the bargain he had acquired.

At a resolute way-station on the edge of a swamp he left the cars. The man froml whom he had purchased, a lean, whiskered individual, met him with a team and, buckboard, and together they started on the long dr.ive fourteen miles back in the country to the scene of the Chicagoan's prospective future operation,s. As they bumped ,along over the corduroy road the northern man turned to his companion and said:

"I'm hoping to make a good deal of money out of this new line and I'r4 trusting to you to put me onto the ropes. I know something about the selling end of the game but this is gginrg to be my first experience in the actual getting out of the raw stock."

"Well, suh," said the late propr,ietor, "I'll give you my own experiences in the sawmill business and then you kin draw yore own conclusions. This yere mill 'I sold you didn't cost me naray cent to begin with. When my father-inlaw died he left it to me all complete and clear of debt.

"Labor ain't cost mie nothin' because my two boys and me dq all the work and we ain't never had to hire no outside help. And the t,imber we've cut afn't cost nothin' neither 'cause, just between you and m,e, we been sort o' stealin' it off the land of a rrich Yankee who owns a big stretch of the bottorrrs and ain't got nobody watchin' it.

'll've also been kind of favored in the matter of shipme_nts, seein' that my cbusin is district freight agent for the railroad and he fixes up things so part of the time our freightin' don't amount to nothin''at all.

"So that's the way she stands-no wages for outside hands, no cost for timber, and practically nothin' for freight bills.

"And last year I lost twenty-five hundred. dollars."