KEEP PEGGING AWAY
To give happiness is to deserve happiness.—Rosseau.
Men seldom mount at a single bound
To the ladder’s very top;
They must slowly climb it, round by round,
With many a start and stop.
And the winner is sure to be the man
Who labors day by day,
For the world has learned that the safest plan
Is to keep on pegging away.
Self-respect,—that corner-stone of all virtues.—John Herschel.
You have read, of course, about the hare
And the tortoise—the tale is old—
How they ran a race—it counts not where—
And the tortoise won, we’re told.
The hare was sure he had time to pause
And to browse about and play,
So the tortoise won the race because
He just kept pegging away.
A little toil and a little rest,
And a little more earned than spent,
Is sure to bring to an honest breast
A blessing of glad content.
And so, though skies may frown or smile,
Be diligent day by day;
Reward shall greet you after while
If you just keep pegging away.
This, then, is a proof of a well-trained mind, to delight in what is good, and to be annoyed at the opposite.—Cicero.
The Chinese tell of one of their countrymen, a student, who, disheartened by the difficulties in his way, threw down his book in despair, when, seeing a woman rubbing a crowbar on a stone, he inquired the reason, and was told that she wanted a needle, and thought she would rub down the crowbar till she got it small enough. Provoked by this example of patience to “try again,” he resumed his studies, and became one of the foremost scholars of the empire.
There never was so much room for the best as there is to-day.—Thayer.
After more than ten years of wandering through the unexplored depths of the primeval forests of America in the study of birds and animals, Audubon determined to publish the results of his painstaking energy. He went to Philadelphia with a portfolio of two hundred sheets, filled with colored delineations of about one thousand birds, drawn life-size. Being obliged to leave the city before making final arrangements as to their disposition, he placed his drawings in the warehouse of a friend. On his return in a few weeks he found to his utter dismay that the precious fruits of his wanderings had been utterly destroyed by rats. The shock threw him into a fever of several weeks’ duration, but with returning health his native energy came back, and taking up his gun and game-bag, his pencils and drawing-book, he went forward to the forests as gaily as if nothing had happened. He set to work again, pleased with the thought that he might now make better drawings than he had done before, and in three years his portfolio was refilled.
A healthful hunger for a great idea is the beauty and blessedness of life.—Jean Ingelow.
A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.—Lamb.
There is no real life but cheerful life.—Addison.
When Carlyle had finished the first volume of his “French Revolution” he lent the manuscript to a friend to read. A maid, finding what she supposed to be a bundle of waste paper on the parlor floor used it to light the kitchen fire. Without spending any time in uttering lamentations, the author set to work and triumphantly reproduced the book in the form in which it now appears.
A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.—Thoreau.
There is one thing in this world better than making a living, and that is making a life.—Russell.
“How hard I worked at that tremendous shorthand, and all improvement appertaining to it! I will only add to what I have already written of perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong point of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success.” Such is Charles Dickens’s testimony to the value of sticking to it.
A man must be one of two things; either a reed shaken by the wind, or a wind to shake the reeds.—Handford.
One of the clever characters created by the pen of George Horace Lorimer says: “Life isn’t a spurt, but a long, steady climb. You can’t run far up hill without stopping to sit down. Some men do a day’s work, and then spend six lolling around admiring it. They rush at a thing with a whoop and use up all their wind in that. And when they’ve rested and got it back, they whoop again and start off in a new direction.”
There is nothing at all in life except what we put there.—Madame Swetchine.
Says the poet, James Whitcomb Riley, “For twenty years I tried to get into one magazine; back came my manuscripts eternally. I kept on. In the twentieth year that magazine accepted one of my articles.”
He is, in my opinion, the noblest who has raised himself by his own merit to a higher station.—Cicero.
The eminent essayist, William Mathews, tells us: “The restless, uneasy, discontented spirit which sends a mechanic from the East to the South, the Rocky Mountains, or California, renders continuous application anywhere irksome to him, and so he goes wandering about the world, a half-civilized Arab, getting the confidence of nobody, and almost sure to die insolvent.”
A page digested is better than a volume hurriedly read.—Macaulay.
The boys who stick to it, and the men who stick to it, are the ones who achieve results. It does not pay to scatter one’s energies. If a man cannot succeed at one thing he is even less likely to succeed at many things. Just here would be a good place, I think, to tell how Johnny’s father taught him