There is a tonic for young people who purpose to make the most of
themselves in glimpses of a few college students who had the courage to
face difficulty. One of these was an Italian boy, who was glad to beat
carpets, wash windows, scrub kitchen floors, mow lawns, teach grammar,
arithmetic and vocal exercises at a night school for foreigners.
Then--as if his time was not fully occupied by these occupations--he
made arrangements to care for a furnace and sift the ashes, in exchange
for piano lessons. That student finished his preparatory course with
credit, taking a prize for scholarship.
A seventeen-year-old boy wanted an education, but he had nine brothers
and sisters at home, and he knew that he could look for no financial
assistance from his parents. So he picked cotton at sixty cents a
hundred pounds, sawed wood, cut weeds and scrubbed floors--and thus paid
his expenses.
One student could not spare the money to pay his railroad fare to the
school of his choice. But he had a pony. So he rode the pony the entire
distance of five hundred miles, working for his expenses along the way.
A beginner in college was too full of grit to give up when bills came on
him more heavily than he had expected. During the school year he did
chores, rang the bell for the change of classes, did janitor work, and
waited on table in restaurants. In the summer he found work on farms
near by.
"No task is too difficult for the man with a purpose," declared a worker
with young men, some of whom were ready to give up. "Two things are
necessary if you would be successful," was another man's message to
those whom he wished to inspire to do purposeful work. "First: know what
you want to do. Second: do it."
Those who permit obstacles to stand in the way of the performance of
tasks they know they ought to perform if they would make the most of
themselves, need to take to heart the message given by a mother to her
son when he was ready to give up the unequal struggle with poverty and
physical infirmity. "Thou wilt have much to bear, many hardships to
suffer," she said. "But mark what I say, we must not mind the trouble.
During the first part of the night we must prepare the bed on which to
stretch ourselves during the latter part."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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