As an illustration[1] of the dangers of over-work, I will cite the case of a boy born of well-to-do parents in —— County, Kentucky. There were several children older and one younger than the lad in question. This youngest boy had a brain of the very best calibre. Talent, latent energy, and determination were written in every line of the child’s face. “He has the will of a Napoleon,” said his father, and this was true.
[1] This and other illustrations are with the names of persons and places simply changed.
The brother of whom I would speak was five years the senior of master Jefferson, a boy with a very large head, lack-lustre eyes, and a mixture of amiability and apathy in his air and manner. He relished neither work, or study, or play. I boarded in the family, and had ample opportunity for exact observation of the very different characters composing it. The parents were unusually rugged and hearty, and the children, with this one exception, took after them.
When, by careful steps, I led the mother back to the summer preceding dull Charley’s birth, she was able to recall quite vividly the circumstances that had surrounded her, and the kind of life she led.
“Had she,” I asked, “been unhappy?”
“Oh, dear no; she had had nothing to be unhappy about.”
“Was she sick during any part of her pregnancy? Had she felt her condition a greater tax on her powers than was usual with her?”
“No; on the contrary, she had been filled with ambition.”
Her husband’s mother was making her first visit with them, and she was anxious to prove to her how good and “smart” a woman her son had married. Business had taken her husband away from home (he was a horse and cattle trader, and was often absent months at a time), and she had desired to surprise him on his return by all she had accomplished.