A part of the good of "speaking a piece" is to try again, determined to retrieve failure. Success is not always a good thing for a boy or a girl, any more than for a man or a woman. The discipline of failure is sometimes needed. To fail is not always a calamity, if the failure leads to the correction of the faults that lead to failure. Whether it be speaking a piece or learning a lesson or facing a trying situation in business, no matter how many times one has failed, he needs to take to heart the message of Macbeth: We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-point, And we'll not fail. Always there is a reward for those who fight against difficulties, who persist in their struggle even when failure follows failure. Everyday the glad story of the sequel to such persistent struggles is recorded. The records of commercial life, of school life, of home life are full of these. VI CONQUERING INFIRMITY Of all obstacles that can stand in the way of courageous conquest, one of the most fatal, in the opinion of many, is blindness. Yet it is not necessary that the loss of the eyes should be the fatal handicap it is almost universally considered. It is a mistake to feel that when a worker has anything seriously and permanently wrong with his eyes he cannot be expected longer to perform tasks that are normal for one who has the full use of all his five senses. In fact, when we hear that a man is going blind we are apt to dismiss with a sigh his chance for continuing productive labor of any sort; we feel that there is little left for him but sitting resignedly in a chimney corner and listening to others read to him or patiently fingering the raised letters provided for the use of the blind. In protest against this error a novelist has taken for his hero a young man who lost his sight. His friends pitied him, talked dolefully to him, promised to look after him in the days of incapacity. Of course he sank lower and lower in the doleful dumps. Then one came into his life who never seemed to notice his blindness, who talked to him as if he could see, who encouraged him to do things by taking it for granted that they would be performed. Her treatment proved effective; before long the blind man was learning self-reliance, and was well on the road to achievement.