Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social LifeBlackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Science
Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social Life
Blackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Characters and characteristics; Success
"After visiting all of my clients trying to collect money, I came to the
conclusion that it would be useless to expect anything to come in to me
for at least thirty days. At this time I had $1.25 in my pocket. My room I
had paid for in advance by doing a piece of work for my landlord. I also
had about a cord of good oak wood which I had sawed and split and piled in
the hallway under the stairs. I had a little sheet-iron stove which I used
for both heating and cooking. I sat down and carefully figured out how I
could make my $1.25 feed me until I could collect the money due.
Twenty-five cents purchased three quarts of strained honey from a
bee-keeper friend of mine. The dollar I invested in hominy. Every morning,
when I first got up and built the fire, I put on a double boiler with as
much hominy as would cook in it. While it was cooking I sat down and
studied hard on my calculus. By the time I had got a pretty good hold of
the pot-hooks and the bird-tracks in the calculus lesson, the hominy would
be ready to eat. Hominy and honey is not a bad breakfast. While perhaps
you would like some variety, it is also fairly edible for lunch. If you
are very, very hungry, as a growing boy ought to be, and have been hard at
work putting up bell wires and arranging batteries, doubtless you would
rather eat hominy and honey for dinner than go without. The next morning
the combination doesn't taste quite so good, and by lunch time you are
beginning to wonder whether hominy and honey will satisfy all your
cravings. In the evening, however, you are quite sure that, in the absence
of anything else, you will have to have some hominy and honey in order to
keep yourself alive. By the end of the first week you feel that you can
never even hear the word hominy again without nausea and that you wish
never to look a bee in the face. By the end of the second week you have
become indifferent to the whole matter and simply take your hominy and
honey as a matter of course, trying to think nothing about it and
interesting yourself as much as possible in calculus, generator design,
strength of materials, and other things that an engineering student has to
study.
"The month finally passed. I felt as if I had eaten my way out of a
mountain of hominy and waded through a sea of honey. Collections began
coming in a little and I went and bought a beefsteak. You may have eaten
some palatable viands. I have myself partaken of meals that cost as much
as I made in a whole week's work in my school days. But let me assure you
that no one ever had a meal that tasted better than the beefsteak and
fried potatoes which finally broke the hominy and honey regime."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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