style="font-size:15px;"> 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
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.
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