Boy Wanted. Waterman Nixon
be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong point of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success.” Such is Charles Dickens’s testimony to the value of sticking to it.
A man must be one of two things; either a reed shaken by the wind, or a wind to shake the reeds. – Handford.
One of the clever characters created by the pen of George Horace Lorimer says: “Life isn’t a spurt, but a long, steady climb. You can’t run far up hill without stopping to sit down. Some men do a day’s work, and then spend six lolling around admiring it. They rush at a thing with a whoop and use up all their wind in that. And when they’ve rested and got it back, they whoop again and start off in a new direction.”
There is nothing at all in life except what we put there. – Madame Swetchine.
Says the poet, James Whitcomb Riley, “For twenty years I tried to get into one magazine; back came my manuscripts eternally. I kept on. In the twentieth year that magazine accepted one of my articles.”
He is, in my opinion, the noblest who has raised himself by his own merit to a higher station. – Cicero.
The eminent essayist, William Mathews, tells us: “The restless, uneasy, discontented spirit which sends a mechanic from the East to the South, the Rocky Mountains, or California, renders continuous application anywhere irksome to him, and so he goes wandering about the world, a half-civilized Arab, getting the confidence of nobody, and almost sure to die insolvent.”
A page digested is better than a volume hurriedly read. – Macaulay.
The boys who stick to it, and the men who stick to it, are the ones who achieve results. It does not pay to scatter one’s energies. If a man cannot succeed at one thing he is even less likely to succeed at many things. Just here would be a good place, I think, to tell how Johnny’s father taught him
He that can have patience can have what he will. – Franklin.
One day, in huckleberry-time, when little Johnny Wales
And half-a-dozen other boys were starting with their pails
To gather berries, Johnny’s pa, in talking with him, said
That he could tell him how to pick so he’d come out ahead.
“First find your bush,” said Johnny’s pa, “and then stick to it till
You’ve picked it clean. Let those go chasing all about who will
In search of better bushes, but it’s picking tells, my son;
To look at fifty bushes doesn’t count like picking one.”
Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself. – Plato.
A man who dares waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of time. – Darwin.
And Johnny did as he was told, and, sure enough, he found
By sticking to his bush while all the others chased around
In search of better picking, it was as his father said;
For while the others looked, he worked, and thus came out ahead.
And Johnny recollected this when he became a man,
And first of all he laid him out a well-determined plan;
So, while the brilliant triflers failed with all their brains and push,
Wise, steady-going Johnny won by “sticking to his bush.”
CHAPTER III
OPPORTUNITY
There is nothing impossible to him who will try. – Alexander.
If you just get a chance?
Oh, certainly, it would be unfair for us grown-ups to expect you, a mere inexperienced youth, to win without giving you a fair opportunity.
But what is a fair opportunity?
The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. – Gibbon.
Opinions regarding what is best for the making of a boy differ greatly. Some assert that a child born with a silver spoon in its mouth is not likely to breathe as deeply and develop as well as one that is born without any such hindrance to full respiration.
He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green. – Bacon.
Kind parents, a good home training, a chance to go to school, influential friends, good health, and some one to stand between you and the hard knocks of the world all serve to make a boy’s surroundings truly enviable. Under such conditions any boy ought to win. Yet some boys have won without these advantages.
The two noblest things are sweetness and light. – Swift.
The wise prove, and the foolish confess, by their conduct, that a life of employment is the only life worth leading. – Paley.
The world belongs to the energetic. – Emerson.
He who hurts others injures himself; he who helps others advances his own interests. – Buddha.
He that sips of many arts drinks of none. – Fuller.
There is a higher law than the constitution. – William H. Seward.
Abraham Lincoln was born of very poor parents in a very crude cabin. Some years later the family passed through a long, cold, Indiana winter with no shelter but a shed built of poles, open on one side to the frosts and snows. Even when a cabin took the place of this rude “camp” it was left several years, we are told, without floor, doors or windows. His biographers inform us that here in the primeval forest Abraham Lincoln spent his boyhood. His bed of leaves was raised from the ground by poles, resting upon one side in the interstices of the logs of which the hut was built, and upon the other in crotches of sticks driven into the earth. The skins of animals afforded almost the only covering allowed this truly miserable family. Their food was of the simplest and coarsest variety and very scarce. Here Mrs. Lincoln died when Abraham was nine years old, and her lifeless form was placed in a rude coffin which Abraham’s father made with his own hands. The grave was dug in a cleared space in the forest and there Nancy Hanks Lincoln was buried. Many months passed before it was practicable to secure a preacher who, when he came, gathered the family about him in the woods and spoke a few words over the mound of sod. When fame had come, Mr. Lincoln used to say that he never attended school for more than six months in all his life – in no spirit of boastfulness, however, like many a self-made American, but with a regret that was deeply felt. While a boy he worked out his sums on the logs and clapboards of the little cabin, evincing the fondness for mathematics that remained with him through life. But even amid his dark isolation some light found its way to his slowly expanding mind. He got hold of a copy of “Aesop’s Fables,” read “Robinson Crusoe” and borrowed Weems’s “Life of Washington,” filling his mind with the story of that noble character. One night after he had climbed up the pegs, which served as a ladder to reach his cot, which in the more finished condition of the cabin had been placed in the attic, he hid the book under the rafters. The rain which came in before morning soaked the leaves so that he was compelled to go to the farmer from whom he had borrowed the book and offer to make good the loss. That unphilanthropic neighbor exacted as its price three days’ work in the corn-field, and at the end of that time the damaged volume came into the youthful Abraham’s absolute possession. It was a long way from those rude surroundings to the presidential chair in the White House at Washington, but “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,” he made the journey to the glory of himself and the American people.
He that has no cross will have no crown. – Quarles.
What a fine demonstration of the power and efficacy of self-help! It is quite enough to convince any boy that there is no difficulty he cannot overcome when once he has formed an invincible partnership between