I knew a girl who used to sit at a piano four hours a day, just lifting her fingers. It was dreadfully tiring, but you should have heard her play after she got the power.
Don't you go growling about being made to do this, that and the other thing. If you were not so made, you would never do anything by-and-by.
Lots of young people would like to be well known, and called a genius, and a wonder, and shine out so that people would look at them as they passed by. Well, genius is just sweating over things. Genius means hard work. It means being intense—that is a word that suggests elastic pulled out. We call it tense. It is the pulled out elastic that, when let go, makes the power of your catapult.
Columbus was a great sailor and a great man. In his journal is found this sentence: "That day we sailed westward, which was our course."
Think of those last four words. He set himself to do a thing—made a course and did it, followed it, and he got there. That is what a rifle does.
And all the great world people were like that.
Jesus "set His face" to go to Jerusalem.
One of my University class was the champion mile runner of America. I guess he would not mind if I told you his name. It was George Orton.
At the University games a lot of us students were sitting in the bleachers watching the contests. One of them was the mile race and Orton was in it. As they settled down for the mile jog, you could see them watching one another, and trying to keep as close together as possible until the last lap.
Then some one said, "Look at Orton!" And as we looked, we saw the great runner coming down the track with his face as though turned into granite, his eyes set, his teeth together, and every muscle hard as steel. He did not seem to be the same person. "His face was set" and in a second his breast had touched the tape line at the winning post.