Whenever that inner voice speaks to you and tells you that a thing is wrong, don't argue with the voice and give reasons for doing the thing that is wrong. Obey the voice at once, as Parker did, and it will save you endless trouble.
THE BOY AND THE NICKEL
A man once found a boy crying on the street, and asked the little chap what he was crying about. The child told him he had just lost a nickel. The stranger gave him another, and then the boy began to cry again. This greatly astonished the man, and he asked him why he was crying again. The little chap said, "Because, if I hadn't lost that other nickel, I'd have two now."
That was, of course, a very foolish way to look at it, but that is the way a great many people look at things. This is what is called covetousness. Covetous people always want something they have not, and so they are usually unhappy.
The way to be happy is to think of the things you have, and not of the things you have not. A man was once told that Cæsar was going to cause him great unhappiness, and he replied that if Cæsar could blot out the sun with a blanket he might make him unhappy. But if he had the sun to shine upon him, he would still be happy. We all have the sun to shine upon us, and other things a-plenty to be happy over, if we will just count them up. Let us not be like the little boy crying about the nickel he did not have.
THE THREE FATES
Boys and girls in ancient Greece believed that there were three fates, in the form of three women seated above the clouds, who spun the thread of everyone's life, and cut it off with shears when death came.
We no longer believe in such things, but we still speak of fate. Boys and girls sometimes say that they are fated to fail in examinations, and so think they cannot help failing. But that is no more true than the belief about the three women which the Grecian boys and girls held. As a matter of fact, nothing outside of us makes evil things happen to us. We make our own fates. Or shall I say, we are our own fates? Someone has said, "Our fates lie asleep along the roadside until we waken them." That is very true, as I think I can show you by a story.