“Besides, what sufficiently disproves any real meanness, it will be found that children brought up, in this way, to know things in the small――what they cost and what is their value――have, in just that fact, one of the best securities of character and most certain elements of power and success in life; because they expect to get on by small advances followed up and saved by others, not by sudden leaps of fortune that despise the slow but surer methods of industry and merit. When the hard, wiry-looking patriarch of homespun, for example, sets off for Hartford, or Bridgeport, to exchange the little surplus of his year’s production, carrying his provision with him and the fodder for his team, and taking his boy along to show him the great world, you may laugh at the simplicity, or pity, if you will, the sordid look of the picture; but, five or ten years hence, this boy will probably enough be found in college, digging out the cent’s worths of his father’s money in hard study; and some twenty years later he will be returning, in his honours, as the celebrated Judge, or Governor, or Senator and public orator, from some one of the great states of the republic, to bless the sight once more of that venerated pair who shaped his beginnings, and planted the small seeds of his future success. Small seeds, you may have thought, of meanness; but now they have grown up and blossomed into a large-minded life, a generous public devotion, and a free benevolence to mankind. “And just here, I am persuaded, is the secret, in no small degree, of the very peculiar success that has distinguished the sons of Connecticut, and, not least, those of Litchfield County, in their migration to other states. It is because they have gone out in the wise economy of a simple, homespun training, expecting to get on in the world by merit and patience, and by a careful husbanding of small advances; secured in their virtue by just that which makes their perseverance successful. For the men who see the great in the small, and go on to build the great by small increments, and so form a character of integrity before God and men, as solid and massive as the outward successes they conquer. The great men who think to be great in general, having yet nothing great in particular, are a much more windy affair.” Every one ought to roughen life by friendships that will bring into it those influences which are not naturally in our daily associations and will carry us into contact with men and women who struggle harder than we do. A few such friendships will help to keep life from petrification and to make us aware that the world is under a cross, and that our hearts must be as open to all its needs as the heart of the Father of human life is open always.