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
I remember meeting personally a poor carpenter of Hingham,
Massachusetts, who was out of work and in poverty. His wife also drove
him out of doors. He sat down on the shore and whittled a soaked
shingle into a wooden chain. His children quarreled over it in the
evening, and while he was whittling a second one, a neighbor came
along and said, "Why don't you whittle toys if you can carve like
that?" He said, "I don't know what to make!" There is the whole thing.
His neighbor said to him: "Why don't you ask your own children?" Said
he, "What is the use of doing that? My children are different from
other people's children." I used to see people like that when I taught
school. The next morning when his boy came down the stairway, he said,
"Sam, what do you want for a toy?" "I want a wheel-barrow." When his
little girl came down he asked her what she wanted, and she said, "I
want a little doll's washstand, a little doll's carriage, a little
doll's umbrella," and went on with a whole lot of things that would
have taken his lifetime to supply. He consulted his own children right
there in his own house and began to whittle out toys to please them.
He began with his jack-knife, and made those unpainted Hingham toys.
He is the richest man in the entire New England States, if Mr. Lawson
is to be trusted in his statement concerning such things, and yet
that man's fortune was made by consulting his own children in his own
house. You don't need to go out of your own house to find out what to
invent or what to make. I always talk too long on this subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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