Boy Wanted

There never was so much room for the best as there is to-day. – Thayer.

After more than ten years of wandering through the unexplored depths of the primeval forests of America in the study of birds and animals, Audubon determined to publish the results of his painstaking energy. He went to Philadelphia with a portfolio of two hundred sheets, filled with colored delineations of about one thousand birds, drawn life-size. Being obliged to leave the city before making final arrangements as to their disposition, he placed his drawings in the warehouse of a friend. On his return in a few weeks he found to his utter dismay that the precious fruits of his wanderings had been utterly destroyed by rats. The shock threw him into a fever of several weeks’ duration, but with returning health his native energy came back, and taking up his gun and game-bag, his pencils and drawing-book, he went forward to the forests as gaily as if nothing had happened. He set to work again, pleased with the thought that he might now make better drawings than he had done before, and in three years his portfolio was refilled.

A healthful hunger for a great idea is the beauty and blessedness of life. – Jean Ingelow.

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market. – Lamb.

There is no real life but cheerful life. – Addison.

When Carlyle had finished the first volume of his “French Revolution” he lent the manuscript to a friend to read. A maid, finding what she supposed to be a bundle of waste paper on the parlor floor used it to light the kitchen fire. Without spending any time in uttering lamentations, the author set to work and triumphantly reproduced the book in the form in which it now appears.

A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone. – Thoreau.

There is one thing in this world better than making a living, and that is making a life. – Russell.

“How hard I worked at that tremendous shorthand, and all improvement appertaining to it! I will only add to what I have already written of perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to 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

THE SECRET OF SUCCESS

He that can have patience can have what he will. – Franklin.

One day, in huckleberry-time, when little Johnny WalesAnd half-a-dozen other boys were starting with their pailsTo gather berries, Johnny’s pa, in talking with him, saidThat 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 tillYou’ve picked it clean. Let those go chasing all about who willIn 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 foundBy sticking to his bush while all the others chased aroundIn 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

“MYSELF AND I”

A strenuous soul hates a cheap success. – Emerson.

Myself and I close friends have beenSince ’way back where we started.We two, amid life’s thick and thin,Have labored single-hearted.In every season, wet or dry,Or fair or stormy weather,We’ve joined our hands, myself and I,And just worked on together.

All that is great in man comes through work, and civilization is its product. – Smiles.

Though many friends have been as kindAnd loving as a brother,Myself and I have come to findOur best friends in each other,For while to us obscure and smallMay seem the tasks they bend to,We’ve learned our fellow-men have allThey and themselves can tend to.

Ability and necessity dwell near each other. – Pythagoras.

Myself and I, and we alone,You and yourself, good neighbor,Each in his self-determined zoneMust find his field of labor.That prize which men have called “success”Has joy nor pleasure in itTo satisfy the soul unlessMyself and I shall win it.

The only amaranthine flower is virtue. – Cowper.

Dr. Arnold, whose long experience with youth at Rugby gave weight to his opinion, declared that “the difference between one boy and another consists not so much in talent as in energy.” “The longer I live,” says Sir Thomas Buxton, another student of human character, “the more certain I am that the great difference between men, between the great and the insignificant, is energy, invincible determination, an honest purpose once fixed, and then death or victory. This quality will do anything in the world; and no talents, no circumstances, will make a two-legged creature a man without it.”

The secret of success is constancy to purpose. – Beaconsfield.

Says an old Latin proverb: “Opportunity has hair in front, but is bald behind. Seize him by the forelock.”

The only knowledge that a man has is the knowledge he can use. – Macaulay.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. – Addison.

There is a sufficient recompense in the very consciousness of a noble deed. – Cicero.

When Thomas A. Edison went out into the world to make his way, he had received only two months’ regular schooling, but his mother had early impressed upon his mind the thought that he must atone for his lack of school training by developing a taste for reading. His biographers tell us that the “Penny Encyclopedia” and Ure’s “History of the Sciences” were in his hands at a time when most boys, having become acquainted with stories of adventure, look for mystery in every bush and resolve to become pirates and Indian fighters. There are many stories of his early acuteness. One relates how when a boy of twelve or fourteen he was employed in selling papers on a railroad train in Michigan, and upon receiving advance news of a battle of the Rebellion fought at that time he secured fifteen hundred papers on credit, telegraphed the headlines to the stations along the route, and sold his wares at a premium. It was after this exploit that he conceived the idea of starting a daily paper of his own. Securing some old type from the “Detroit Free Press,” he set up his establishment in a car and began the publication of the “Grand Trunk Herald,” the first newspaper ever published on a train. He also installed in the car a laboratory for making experiments in chemistry, and both his newspaper and his experiments flourished until one unlucky day when he set fire to the car with phosphorus. This was too much for the conductor who promptly threw the young editor and scientist with all his belongings out on the station platform, and in addition boxed his ears so roughly as to cause him to be ever after partly deaf. But misfortune could not dampen his ardor. His lack of schooling was more than atoned for by his grit, ambition and studious habits. With the possession of these qualities and the disposition to make the most of spare moments, this famous physicist, chemist, mechanician, and inventor has done more for himself, and more for humanity and the advancement of civilization than any of the college-bred workers in industrial sciences during the last half-century.

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best. – George Eliot.

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes. – Disraeli.

He needs no tears who lived a noble life. – Fitz James O’Brien.

“Yesterday’s successes belong to yesterday with all of yesterday’s defeats and sorrows,” says a present day philosopher. “The day is here! The time is now!”

RIGHT HERE AND JUST NOW

I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser to-day than he was yesterday. – Abraham Lincoln.

“If I’d ’a’ been born,” says Sy Slocum to me,“In some other far-away clime,Or if I could ’a’ had my existence,” says he,“In some other long-ago time,I know I’d ’a’ flourished in pretty fine styleAnd set folks a-talkin’, I ’low,But what troubles me is there’s nothin’ worth whileA-doin’ right here and just now.”

Hurry not only spoils work, but spoils life also. – Lubbock.

“Them folks that can dwell in a country,” says Sy,“Where they don’t have no winter nor storm,And the weather ain’t ready to freeze ’em or fry,By gettin’ too cold or too warm,Have got all the time that they want to sit downAnd think out a project so greatThat it’s just about certain to win ’em renownAnd bring ’em success while they wait.”

I cannot hear what you say for listening to what you are. – Emerson.

Says Sy, “Folks a-livin’ here ages ago,Before all the chances had flownFor makin’ a hit, wouldn’t stand any showTo-day at a-holdin’ their own.Good times will come back to our planet, I ’low,When I’ve faded out of the scene;But it hurts me to think that right here and just nowIs a sorry betwixt and between.”At that I got tired a-hearin’ Sy spout,And says I, “Sy, you like to enthuseRegardin’ the marvelous work you’d turn outIf you stood in some other man’s shoes;But while all your ’might-’a’-been’ praises you sing,It’s worth while recallin’ as howThat no man on earth ever does the first thingThat he can’t do right here and just now!”

Honest labor wears a lovely face. – Decker.

Jean Paul Richter, who suffered greatly from poverty, said that he would not have been rich for worlds.

“I began life with a sixpence,” said Girard, “and believe that a man’s best capital is his industry.”

I am a part of all that I have seen. – Tennyson.

Thomas Ball, the sculptor, whose fine statues ornament the parks and squares of Boston, used as a lad to sweep out the halls of the Boston Museum. Horace Greeley, journalist and orator, was the son of a poor New Hampshire farmer and for years earned his living by typesetting. Thorwaldsen, the great Danish sculptor, was the son of humble Icelandic fisher-folk, but by study and perseverance he became one of the greatest of modern sculptors. In the Copenhagen museum alone are six hundred examples of his art.

If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it. – Marcus Aurelius.

Benjamin Franklin, philosopher and statesman, was the son of a tallow-chandler, and was the fifteenth child in a family of seventeen children. This would seem to go far toward proving that it is no misfortune to be born into a home of many brothers and sisters. Lord Tennyson, too, was the third child in a family of eleven children, all born within a period of thirteen years. They formed a joyous, lively household, amusements being agreeably mingled with their daily tasks. They were all handsome and gifted, with marked personal traits and imaginative temperaments. They were very fond of reading and story-telling. At least four of the boys – Frederick, Charles, Alfred, and Edward – were given to verse-writing.

A thing is never too often repeated which is never sufficiently learned. – Seneca.

Any man may commit a mistake, but none but a fool will continue in it. – Cicero.

John Bunyan, author of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which is said to have obtained a larger circulation than any other book in English except the Bible, was a tinker. Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist, and most influential naturalist of the eighteenth century, was a shoemaker’s apprentice.

As a matter of fact, a man’s first duty is to mind his own business. – Lorimer.

George Stephenson, the English engineer and inventor, was in his youth a stoker in a colliery, learning to read and write at a workingmen’s evening school. Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning-jenny, and founder of the great cotton industries of England, never saw the inside of a school-house until after he was twenty years of age, having long served as a barber’s assistant.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. – Whipple.

John Jacob Astor began life as a peddler in the streets of New York, where his descendants now own real estate worth hundreds of millions.

Civility costs nothing and buys everything. – Lady Montague.

Shakespeare in his youth was a wool-carder.

Cheerful looks make every dish a feast. – Massinger.

Thousands of other examples might be mentioned to show that lowly birth is no barrier to lofty attainment. It has been truly said that genius ignores all social barriers and springs forth wherever heaven has dropped the seed. The grandest characters known in art, literature, and the useful inventions, have illustrated the axiom that “brave deeds are the ancestors of brave men,” and, as Ballou has told us, “it would almost appear that an element of hardship is necessary to the effective development of true genius. Indeed, when we come to the highest achievements of the greatest minds, it seems that they were not limited by race, condition of life, or the circumstances of their age.”

Character, good or bad, has a tendency to perpetuate itself. – Hodge.

So we see that it is something within the boy rather than conditions about him that is to determine what he is to become. A boy with a good mind with which to think and a determination to do, is pretty sure of doing something worth while. The whole world knows that so much depends on whether or not the boy cultivates a determination to

KEEP A-TRYING

Do not hang a dismal picture on your wall, and do not deal with sables and glooms in your conversations. – Emerson.

Say “I will!” and then stick to it —That’s the only way to do it.Don’t build up a while and thenTear the whole thing down again.Fix the goal you wish to gain,Then go at it heart and brain,And, though clouds shut out the blue,Do not dim your purpose trueWith your sighing.Stand erect, and, like a man,Know “They can who think they can!”Keep a-trying.

Pray for a short memory as to all unkindnesses – Spurgeon.

Do to-day thy nearest duty. – Goethe.

Had Columbus, half seas o’er,Turned back to his native shore,Men would not, to-day, proclaimRound the world his deathless name.So must we sail on with himPast horizons far and dim,Till at last we own the prizeThat belongs to him who triesWith faith undying;Own the prize that all may winWho, with hope, through thick and thinKeep a-trying.

CHAPTER IV

OVER AND UNDERDOING

If you will not hear reason, she will surely rap your knuckles. – Franklin.

Learn to do, without overdoing. Too much striving for success is as bad as too little.

Bishop Hall says: “Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.”

The only true conquests – those which awaken no regrets – are those obtained over our ignorance. – Napoleon.

“You have too much respect upon the world,” Shakespeare tells us. “They lose it that do buy it with much care.”

Do not cram books into your head until you crowd pleasant thinking out of it.

A moderately informed man standing firmly on his two good legs is a much superior man to the wise professor who is unable to leave his bed.

The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise high with the occasion. – Abraham Lincoln.

“What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” And what does it profit him if he shall become a multi-millionaire and lose his health of mind or body?

Success that costs more than it is worth is failure.

If you want to be missed by your friends, be useful. – Robert E. Lee.

Make haste slowly. Be ambitious but not foolish.

Learn a few things and learn them well. He who grasps much holds little. Upon investigating the fund of information possessed by a great many young persons it has been found that the matter with it is the “smatter.”

Herbert Spencer says the brains of precocious children cease to develop after a certain age, like a plant that fails to flower.

The man of grit carries in his presence a power which spares him the necessity of resenting insult. – Whipple.

“Those unhappy children who are forced to rise too early in their classes are conceited all the forenoon of their lives and stupid all the afternoon,” says Professor Huxley. “The keenness and vitality which should have been stored up for the sharp struggle of practical existence have been washed out of them by precocious mental debauchery, by book-gluttony and lesson-bibbing. Their faculties are worn out by the strain put upon their callow brains, and they are demoralized by worthless, childish triumphs before the real tasks of life begin.”

If you would create something you must be something. – Goethe.

Carlyle’s words upon this subject are worth remembering: “The richer a nature, the harder and slower its development. Two boys were once members of a class in the Edinburgh Grammar School: John, ever trim, precise, and a dux; Walter, ever slovenly, confused, and a dolt. In due time John became Baillie John, of Hunter Square, and Walter became Sir Walter Scott, of the universe. The quickest and completest of all vegetables is the cabbage.”

Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way through the world. – Chesterfield.

Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties. – Spurgeon.

We all know that there is a happy medium between too much preciseness and slovenliness; between laziness and an unwarranted degree of mental activity; between ignorance and an intellect ground to an edge too fine to carve its way through a hard world.

The least error should humble, but we should never permit even the greatest to discourage us. – Bishop Potter.

“It is now generally conceded on all hands,” says Professor Mathews, “that the mind has no right to build itself up at the expense of the body; that it is no more justifiable in abandoning itself without restraint to its cravings, than the body in yielding itself to sensual indulgence. The acute stimulants, the mental drams, that produce this unnatural activity or overgrowth of the intellect, are as contrary to nature, and as hurtful to the man, as the coarser stimulants that unduly excite the body. The mind, it has been well said, should be a good, strong, healthy feeder, but not a glutton. When unduly stimulated, it wears out the mechanism of the body, like friction upon a machine not lubricated, and the growing weakness of the physical frame nullifies the power it incloses.”