The correspondence schools deserve very great credit for inducing hundreds of thousands of people, including clerks, mill operatives, and employees of all kinds, to take their courses, and thus save for study the odds and ends of time which otherwise would probably be thrown away. We have heard of some most remarkable instances of rapid advancement which these correspondence school students have made by reason of the improvement in their education. Many students have reaped a thousand per cent on their educational investment. It has saved them years of drudgery and has shortened wonderfully the road to their goal.
Wisdom will not open her doors to those who are not willing to pay the price in self-sacrifice, in hard work. Her jewels are too precious to scatter before the idle, the ambitionless.
The very resolution to redeem yourself from ignorance at any cost is the first great step toward gaining an education.
Charles Wagner once wrote to an American regarding his little boy, "May he know the price of the hours. God bless the rising boy who will do his best, for never losing a bit of the precious and God-given time."
There is untold wealth locked up in the long winter evenings and odd moments ahead of you. A great opportunity confronts you. What will you do with it?
CHAPTER LIII
THE POWER OF SUGGESTION
When plate-glass windows first came into use, Rogers, the poet, took a severe cold by sitting with his back to what he supposed was an open window in a dining-room but which was really plate-glass. All the time he was eating he imagined he was taking cold, but he did not dare ask to have the window closed.
We little realize how much suggestion has to do with health. In innumerable instances people have been made seriously ill, sometimes fatally so, by others telling them how badly they looked, or suggesting that they had inherited some fatal disease.