Perhaps a taste of the wilderness is what we need when we become impatient of trifles and make ourselves miserable because everything does not go to suit us.
IV
PERSISTING
Failure camps on the trail of the man who is ready to give up because difficulties multiply. A representative of a large paper warehouse made up his mind to add to his list of customers a certain Michigan firm. Repeated rebuffs did not daunt him. Every sixty days he sent the firm a letter of invitation to buy his goods. During twenty-seven years one hundred and sixty-one letters were mailed without result. Then, in reply to the one hundred and sixty-second letter, the Michigan firm asked for quotations. These were given promptly, and two carloads of paper were sold. What if this letter writer had become discouraged before he wrote this final letter?
"I thought you were planning to complete your education," a friend said to a young man whom he had not seen for some time; "yet now you are clerking in a store. Perhaps, though, you are earning money for next year's expenses."
"No, I am earning money for this year's expenses," was the discouraged reply. "I did want an education, but I found it was too difficult to get what I sought, so I have decided to settle down."
Of course it is easier to give up than it is to push on in the face of difficulty, but the youth who pushes on is fitting himself to fill a man's place in the world, while the young man who is easily discouraged is fitting himself for nothing but disappointment. The world has no place for a quitter.
There is a tonic for young people who purpose to make the most of themselves in glimpses of a few college students who had the courage to face difficulty. One of these was an Italian boy, who was glad to beat carpets, wash windows, scrub kitchen floors, mow lawns, teach grammar, arithmetic and vocal exercises at a night school for foreigners. Then—as if his time was not fully occupied by these occupations—he made arrangements to care for a furnace and sift the ashes, in exchange for piano lessons. That student finished his preparatory course with credit, taking a prize for scholarship.
A seventeen-year-old boy wanted an education, but he had nine brothers and sisters at home, and he knew that he could look for no financial assistance from his parents. So he picked cotton at sixty cents a hundred pounds, sawed wood, cut weeds and scrubbed floors—and thus paid his expenses.
One student could not spare the money to pay his railroad fare to the school of his choice. But he had a pony. So he rode the pony the entire distance of five hundred miles, working for his expenses along the way.
A beginner in college was too full of grit to give up when bills came on him more heavily than he had expected. During the school year he did chores, rang the bell for the change of classes, did janitor work, and waited on table in restaurants. In the summer he found work on farms near by.