The Making of Bobby Burnit

Old John Burnit’s will calls his son a fool, then concedes the fault is his own for minding his business more closely than his boy. So the fortune goes into a trusteeship Bobby cannot even identify, and all he inherits outright is the John Burnit Store, to conduct in person. Until then his interests had run to healthy amusements and Agnes Elliston. What follows is a run of expensive lessons: a consolidation with Silas Trimmer, the rival whose store backs up against his own, a swamp scheme, a theatrical venture, a few politicians. Each arrives with a sealed gray envelope of his father’s advice, handed over by an old clerk at the worst possible moment. Chester wrote it as comedy, and it ran in magazines before Bobbs-Merrill made a book of it in 1909, but the joke has a spine.