Somerset Maugham, the English writer, once wrote a story about a janitor at St Peter’s Church in London. One day a young vicar discovered that the janitor was illiterate and fired him. Jobless, the man invested his meagre savings in a tiny tobacco shop, where he prospered, bought another, expanded, and ended up with a chain of tobacco stores worth several hundred thousand pounds. One day the man’s banker said, “You’ve done well for an illiterate, but imagine where you would be if you could read and write?” “Well,” replied the man, “I’d be janitor at St Peter’s Church in Neville Square.”

Source: The Best of Bits and Pieces, 1994, New Jersey USA: The Economics Press, p.178

Somerset Maugham, the English writer, once wrote a story about a janitor at St Peter’s Church in London. One day a young vicar discovered that the janitor was illiterate and fired him. Jobless, the man invested his meagre savings in a tiny tobacco shop, where he prospered, bought another, expanded, and ended up with a chain of tobacco stores worth several hundred thousand pounds. One day the man’s banker said, “You’ve done well for an illiterate, but imagine where you would be if you could read and write?” “Well,” replied the man, “I’d be janitor at St Peter’s Church in Neville Square.”

Source: The Best of Bits and Pieces, 1994, New Jersey USA: The Economics Press, p.178