Russell H. Conwell, founder of the Institutional church in America : $b the work and the manBurr, Agnes Rush
Religion
Russell H. Conwell, founder of the Institutional church in America : $b the work and the man
Burr, Agnes Rush
Conwell, Russell H., 1843-1925; Minneapolis (Minn.) -- Biography
But I need another illustration, and I found that in Massachusetts,
and I am sorry I did, because that is my old State. This young man I
mention went out of the State to study--went down to Yale College and
studied Mines and Mining. They paid him fifteen dollars a week during
his last year for training students who were behind their classes in
mineralogy, out of hours, of course, while pursuing his own studies.
But when he graduated they raised his pay from fifteen dollars to
forty-five dollars and offered him a professorship. Then he went
straight home to his mother and said, "Mother, I won't work for
forty-five dollars a week. What is forty-five dollars a week for a man
with a brain like mine! Mother, lets go out to California and stake
out gold claims and be immensely rich." "Now" said his mother, "it is
just as well to be happy as it is to be rich."
But as he was the only son he had his way--they always do; and they
sold out in Massachusetts and went to Wisconsin, where he went into
the employ of the Superior Copper Mining Company, and he was lost from
sight in the employ of that company at fifteen dollars a week again.
He was also to have an interest in any mines that he should discover
for that company. But I do not believe that he has ever discovered a
mine--I do not know anything about it, but I do not believe he has. I
know he had scarcely gone from the old homestead before the farmer
who had bought the homestead went out to dig potatoes, and as he was
bringing them in in a large basket through the front gateway, the ends
of the stone wall came so near together at the gate that the basket
hugged very tight. So he set the basket on the ground and pulled,
first on one side and then on the other side. Our farms in
Massachusetts are mostly stone walls, and the farmers have to be
economical with their gateways in order to have some place to put the
stones. That basket hugged so tight there that as he was hauling it
through he noticed in the upper stone next the gate a block of native
silver, eight inches square; and this professor of mines and mining
and mineralogy, who would not work for forty-five dollars a week, when
he sold that homestead in Massachusetts, sat right on that stone to
make the bargain. He was brought up there; he had gone back and forth
by that piece of silver, rubbed it with his sleeve, and it seemed to
say, "Come now, now, now, here is a hundred thousand dollars. Why
not take me?" But he would not take it. There was no silver in
Newburyport; it was all away off--well, I don't know where; he didn't,
but somewhere else--and he was a professor of mineralogy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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