Excerpt from Ready for Business: Or Choosing an Occupation; A Series of Practical Papers for Boys If I am right in supposing there are a large num ber of boys who think as I have just suggested, the series of sketches, presented in this book, will be found useful. My aim is to give in them what might be called an inside view of various trades and businesses which, as a rule, are attract ive to youth, and to help the lad in either making his selection from a number of industries, or give him more light on the one which he feels sure will please him, but about the real nature of which he has probably only a cursory knowledge. In other words, the effort will be made to answer just such questions as a boy would naturally ask about an occupation while he was making up his mind as to whether or not he would like to enter it. On the general topic of how to succeed in life, I shall in these articles have little to say. Scores of books have been written on success, and hundreds of men, some great, but many small, have endeav ored to tell us the secret of success'. I have read many of these works, and doubtless my young readers have perused volumes of that kind; but I have failed to find any new or short road to that goal for which we all are striving. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.