“I have all the money I need,” he said. “I want to do some real work; it’s only doing things that counts.”
You know, of course, the joy of doing something quite apart from anything you have to do, just because you have taken up with the idea for its own sake. Then you run to meet any amount of effort, and work becomes play. Mr. Hoover and his wife now took up a task together with all the zest that one puts into a fascinating game. Can you imagine getting fun out of translating a great Latin book about mines and minerals?
“For some time I have looked forward to putting old Agricola into English,” explained Mr. Hoover; “we are having a real holiday working it up.”
“Who in the world was Agricola, and what does he matter to you?” demanded his friend, in amazement.
“Agricola, my dear fellow, was the Latinized name of a German mining engineer who lived in the early part of the sixteenth century—a time when it was not only the fashion to turn one’s name into Latin, but to write all books of any importance in that language. He matters a good deal to any one who happens to be especially interested in the science of mining. This volume we are at work on is the cornerstone of that science.”
“How, then, does it happen that it has never been translated before?” asked the friend.
“Well,” replied Mr. Hoover, with some hesitation, “you see it wasn’t a particularly easy job. Agricola’s Latin had its limitations, but his knowledge of minerals and mining problems was prodigious. Only a mining expert could possibly get at what he was trying to say, and most mining experts have something more paying to do than to undertake a thing of this kind.”
“I see,” retorted his friend, with a smile; “you are doing this because you have nothing more paying to do!”
“Yes,” replied Mr. Hoover, quietly, “there is nothing that is more paying than the thing that is your work—because you particularly want to do it.”
Mr. Hoover would say without any hesitation that the work which he volunteered to do when the storm of the great war broke on Europe in August, 1914, was “paying” in the same way. This citizen of the world was at his London headquarters, from which, as consulting engineer, he was directing vast mining interests, when the panic of fear seized the crowds of American tourists who had gone abroad as to a favorite pleasure-park and had found it suddenly transformed into a battle-field. Hundreds of people were as frightened and helpless as children caught in a burning building. All at once they found themselves in a strange, threatening world, without means of escape.